Baltimore Community Data Science

Course Overview

This course (September-December) aims to facilitate interactions between Johns Hopkins students with data skills and Baltimore community-based organizations (CBOs) to help support these CBOs to use data to support their causes. Students will participate in a hands-on project working with a Baltimore CBO to address data related needs.

Project Examples

• Planning data collection so that it is tailored to assist the needs of the organization. This could include survey ethics, design, and implementation.

• Data wrangling/cleaning - working with the data to get it in a format that is readily usable for creating graphs, tables, and statistics. (This is often the most important step but often overlooked!)

• Data visualization - to enable partners to make highly flexible and effective visualizations to inform themselves and others about patterns in data.

• Dashboard creation - to showcase results in a user-friendly way through a public facing website.

• Data analysis - identify patterns about the data to assist with decision making processes and to assist with getting funding.

Expectations of the CBO Partner

Partners will need to provide students with details on:

• the project goals and uses
• access to relevant data (could be de-identified or simulated if privacy is an issue)
• feedback about whether their goals are being met, and
• time and willingness to learn about how to use and possibly maintain the data product that the students work with them to create

Application & Project Dates

• Application Period: 2 months prior to start of course
• Project Dates: September - December