We opended our annual data science for social good exhibition today. Once again we partnered with several non profits and performed data visualization and analysis. Have a look below for descriptions of the projects and some pictures of the installation.
The Bail Project is a national nonprofit organization that pays bail for people in need, reuniting families and restoring the presumption of innocence. We began devloping web-scraping tools to investigate re-arrest rates in Escambi County Florida.
Additionally we design and installed an exhibit which will highlight the inequities of bail amounts with a focus on the human loss of cash bail.
Accelerating Circularity is a nonprofit that catalyzes new circular supply chains and business models to turn used textiles into mainstream raw materials. We worked with them to analyze the amount of divertible textile in the NYC waste stream. They provided us with a dataset about a hand sorted and labeled sample of trash collected in collaboration with the department of sanitation. We provided them with an analysis, and developed an installation around the topic of textile recyling.
Housing Rights Initiative is a national non-profit watchdog group that investigates real estate fraud, connects tenants to legal services, and promotes tenants’ rights to fair and affordable housing. For this project, they shared with us a dataset related to an investigation they performed on voucher discrminations. They called numerous landlords and brokers about posted vacancies and asked if they would accept a housing voucher. To refuse a voucher is illegal, but many landlords and brokers nonetheless refuse or avoid accepting them. They provided with us a dataset of the locations of all the apartments they investigated, what happened when they called, and whether or not they felt it warranted filing a claim against the landlord or broker.
With this dataset, we provided an analysis of the demographics of the neighborhoods to gain some insight into where this type of discrimination is more prevalant. We also developed an interactive website to highlight this issue.
We also provided analyses and visualizations for City Harvest and Grameen America. That work was preformed on internal datasets and so we are unable to show the results publicily.