It’s week 5, which means we’re already over halfway through the program! The rate of work has been picking up. This week, we gave our midterm presentation to Dr. Le Dantec and a group of researchers and visualization experts. It was a great opportunity to share our research and gain some valuable feedback. We also got to watch the presentations of GwinNETTwork and FloodBud and learn about their work.
Last week, we worked on the database and finally incorporated Census data. The data we obtained contains information such as employment rate, median income, and vacancy status for the block groups and Census tracts within Albany. This information will be invaluable in helping us evaluate the success of the housing projects. After downloading the data from American FactFinder, we restructured it so that each row corresponds to a unique tract-block group combination, joined the data sets by tract and block group, deleted irrelevant and repeated fields, and then renamed the fields as to make for easier analysis. We named the resulting table census_blockgroup.
We integrated all of our tables into a SQL database, which will make it simple to query and retrieve data. This involved picking the column names wisely and ensuring that every column was encoded as the data type that minimizes storage size without truncation. The five tables we have are utilities, housing projects, weather, Census, and addresses. The next step will be to use this for statistical evaluation; hopefully by next week, we will have summary tables to characterize the key variables.
Here is a short snapshot of our data; since there are so many columns, it wouldn’t all fit on screen!
From the utilities:
From the census data:
An image of the query editor, which lets us retrieve information from the database in real time:
