Baltimore Community Data Science

At A Glance

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.

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

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.