Build it, Share it, Hack it: Unlocking Data for Policy Change
Sarah Williams is an assistant professor and director of The Civic Data Design Lab at MIT, working with data to understand it for public good. The Lab seeks to develop alternative practices which can make data and images richer, smarter, more relevant, and more responsive to the needs and interests of citizens traditionally on the margins of policy development. Working with data, maps, and mobile technologies, Williams works to develop interactive design and communication strategies that bring urban policy issues to broader audiences.
Big Data will not change the world unless it is collected and synthesized into tools that generate policy change! The Civic Data Design Lab develops tools, visualizations, and analysis which helps to facilitate policy change. This talk calls everyone to act on the lab's motto of Build It, Hack It, Share it by demonstrating projects that build data sets collected from web sites and social media, evaluate that data using machine learning and geoprocessing, and present the results through open source mapping interfaces. The works shows how visualizing data can be a powerful policy tool. The talk will specifically highlight the labs research projects on identifying ghost cities in China using data scrapped from Chinese social media site, developing the first map of Nairobi's transit system using data builds through cell phones, and the development of a tool (CityDigits) that helps youth learn to be data literate.
For more information visit https://cura.osu.edu/nov17
