Immersive Community Understanding with Data Analytics

“Immersive Community Understanding with Data Analytics” is an ambitious project that aims to encourage and mentor students to connect to and obtain insights on local communities with several massive governmental and commercial datasets. The students will combine and analyze data from the American Community Survey (ACS), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), ESRI, and Yelp.com (Yelp). ACS contains the most granular data on local communities in the U.S., including demographics, economic status, occupation, healthcare coverage, etc. HUD provides data on household structure and property vacancy. ESRI offers the most comprehensive geographical information on local businesses, and Yelp maintains the most diverse user-generated-contents (e.g., consumer reviews) on local businesses. 

Besides the ample datasets, solid research methods including survey, econometrics, and natural language processing (NLP) are also incorporated in the module. Therefore, the students are equipped to dive deeper and explore more the communities of their interest and generate meaningful and actionable insights. For instance, students could see through the data to assess if different groups of people are equally benefited from the development of the market economy and how healthcare spending influences residents’ well-being, to name a few.