Announcing nationalparkscolors - Color palettes inspired by America’s National Parks
Introducing nationalparkscolors, an R package with 20 color palettes inspired by the landscapes, geology, and ecosystems of iconic US National Parks.
Deploying AI across the Research Life Cycle
A practical map of where AI tools can and cannot help across the full research life cycle — from question development to report writing — for both quantitative and qualitative work.
Some Thoughts on AI-Augmented Community Research at the Charlotte Urban Institute
Reflections on a year of using generative AI tools in community research — what works, what keeps me up at night about data governance, and the questions we need to answer as an institute before we go further.
Beautiful Chord Diagrams with Flourish
Chord diagrams are one of the most effective ways to show pairwise relationships between entities. This post covers the theory, code-based approaches in R, Python, and JavaScript, and how to build them quickly using Flourish — illustrated with a real example from the Charlotte Regional Data Trust.
Embracing multilingualism in data science
Series: Reproducible Research Framework at the Charlotte Urban Institute
Why bilingual fluency in R and Python is becoming essential for community research teams
Switching from ArcGIS to QGIS (and a bit of R too)
After years of defaulting to ArcGIS, a real project finally pushed me to give QGIS a serious try and I never went back. Here is what changed, what QGIS does better, and how R has quietly taken on a meaningful share of that workload too.
Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding: How It Works and Where We Use It
Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) is a probabilistic method that estimates racial and ethnic group membership using last names and residential geography — a practical tool for working with administrative data that lacks race and ethnicity fields.
Using tidycensus to Analyze ACS PUMS Data
The American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) gives you individual-level Census records for custom cross-tabulations and analysis. This tutorial walks through using the tidycensus package to pull and analyze PUMS data for Mecklenburg County, NC.
Changing CRDT operations under a Cloud
Series: Rebuilding the Charlotte Regional Data Trust Infrastructure - The Telenovela
reconciling our work with the strategic goals and movements at the institute
Revamping the Charlotte Regional Data Trust - The story so far
Building the data infrastructure to enable use of community data for public good
Plunging into the Data Trust black box, and Deep Cleaning the System
Series: Rebuilding the Charlotte Regional Data Trust Infrastructure - The Telenovela
Dealing with the legacy mess and finding new footings
Releasing v1.0 of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Quality of Life Explorer Data Pipeline
Successfully wrapping up the Phase 1 goals of the QoL automation project
Towards reproducible data science for community and policy research - An experiential roadmap
On developing a reproducible data science framework and practice at the Charlotte Urban Insitute
Charlotte Regional Data Trust - Technical Operations Manual
On how we developed the technical operations manual at the Charlotte Regional Data Trust
Reproducible Research Framework at the Charlotte Urban Institute: Why It Matters Now
Series: Reproducible Research Framework at the Charlotte Urban Institute
describing the key dimensions to developing a reproducible analytical ecosystem at the Urban Institute
Make your code purr - A short intro to iterating using PURRR in R
breeze through loops using the power of purrr