Mentor: Sally Hamouda, Rhode Island College

Project Location

Rhode Island College

Project Description

I have been working with mostly RI high school teachers this past summer helping them integrating data visualization activities in their classes. Teachers had great ideas shared in a workshop that I hosted about best data visualization practices One of the most challenging tasks for teachers was to find the best datasets that can help them in the class room data visualization activities.

I mentored SURF students this last summer and we created a data visualization website just for high school teachers and students. The website is simple and easy to create a visualization at simplechartsri.com.

We would like to expand our work on simplechartsri website. We realized that out of the whole visualization making process, getting an initial set of data that is engaging and formatting it correctly seems to be the most lengthy process. There are many different websites that have collections of datasets of a narrow type, but no single website that includes all of these datasets and puts them in a single place. There is something of the sort made by Google (Google Dataset Search) but this is for machine learning applications and so the datasets are far larger than what high-school teachers would want to use to teach in their classrooms. My idea would involve an extension to the simplechartsri website that allows the user to select their location and a specific tag—environment, education, health, etc.—and bring up a corresponding list of datasets associated with those tags. This is obviously a big problem to tackle, and so narrowing down the scope of the datasets to just include datasets relevant to RI, through scraping websites like ridatahub.org and ri.gov seems like a good place to start. RI.gov includes an api here: https://www.programmableweb.com/api/rigov-open-data-rest-api.