Data Science

How to deal with datasets that are larger than our computer’s memory? Do we still need to learn Structured Query Language (SQL) to create and manage a database?

As an incipient data analyst, one of my first major challenges was to build and manage a spatial database using PostGIS, an open-source software that adds a geographic to PostgreSQL relational databases. I was given several text files in a hard drive that weighed approximately 10 GB each! My first reaction was to double click on the first text file that I saw… but this was clearly...

What can state government do…to attract a data scientist like YOU?

By Kellie Hogue

What’s your next move? When I was in grad school, one of my professors told me that regardless of the job I am currently in, I should always be planning the next step in my career.

At the time, it made sense–academic appointments in my discipline were few and far between, and I wouldn’t get one without some major strategic networking and planning. Simply a case of too much supply, not enough demand....

Introduction

With online communities and social networks serving as important sites for computational social science research, Twitter has quickly become a popular data source for researchers (Frey et al. (2020), Kusen et al. (2017), Rao et al. (2010) and Ru et al. (2021)). This blog post will demonstrate one way to extract twitter data without using the Twitter API. This is especially useful for researchers who are new to exploring the use of Twitter data in their research, looking to develop a baseline corpus for a research question they are newly...

The first time that I mapped out poverty statistics at a municipal scale, I was completely mind blown (figure 1). Looking at the spatial inequities from a bird’s-eye view drove my desire to find more granular data of social indicators to better understand intra-urban socioeconomic inequities. Spatial data techniques help us to find patterns and anomalies across data that improves our understanding of people’s lives in cities, raising new questions about urban infrastructure in terms of public goods provision, land-use, and access. However, finding granular socioeconomic...