How is Rhode Island doing? A free website from Mike DiNardi, director of URI’s Social Science Institute for Research, Education, and Policy (SSIREP) and associate professor of economics, puts the answer in one place.

State of the Ocean State (stateoftheoceanstate.org) tracks 42 measures across eight areas: jobs, income and poverty, housing, health, public safety, education, population, and the ocean economy. Each measure shows its trend over time, and for most of them users can also see how Rhode Island compares with the other New England states and the nation. A Cities & Towns page compares all 39 municipalities on unemployment, overdose deaths, high school graduation and college-going, reading and math scores, chronic absenteeism, and per-pupil spending. Each town also has its own profile.

The data come from public agencies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the CDC, and Rhode Island’s Departments of Education, Labor and Training, and Health, plus KFF’s analysis of Marketplace health insurance premiums. The site checks for new releases every weekday and updates automatically.

DiNardi “vibe coded” the site with Claude, Anthropic’s AI model. He selected the measures and described the features and presentation he wanted, and Claude wrote the code to gather the data and build the pages. DiNardi hopes the site serves as a one-stop shop for those interested in tracking Rhode Island’s progress along these dimensions, and he plans to add more measures and features over time.