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Boston Renaissance Resource Kit
Supporting organization:
Center for Urban and Regional Planning, Northeastern University
URL:
www.curp.neu.edu/visualdata/resourcekit.htm
Project Description:
Making use of data from the U.S. Census, the Greater Boston Social Survey, and the Boston Indicators Project, the Boston Renaissance Resource Kit allows anyone to create thousands of charts and tables with a few simple clicks of the mouse, forgoing the need for extensive training in sophisticated statistical software. This free downloadable tool kit enables individuals and organizations in the greater Boston area to make sense of inter-related trends in areas such as income, housing, employment, ethnicity, age, education within areas as small as a single census tract - and to create graphical displays of this information that can be included in presentations and reports.
Points of interest:
Many activists have ample anecdotal evidence of community trends that they wish to address, but little in the way of quantitative research to back them up. The Boston Renaissance Resource Kit is an example of a resource for grassroots groups that are working for positive change, but that lack the financial and human resources to create surveys of their own. The originators of the Tool Kit are interested in showing that it is possible to "democratize the data" within a region. Now that the digital tool kit has been created, it is (at least theortically) possible to drop other regional datasets into it, so that analyzing and displaying information about local trends can be done quickly, easily, and free of charge from any activist's computer desktop.
