Projects

Local housing policy seeks to balance private sector realities with public sector goals. Key concerns of local decision-makers include availability, affordability, and accessibility of housing stock. Effective housing policy development requires awareness of the types and extent of local housing need as well as the barriers to private sector investment. Accordingly, local decision-makers seek reliable and current sources of data to help set their housing policy priorities. This process might face hardships due to time and budget limits, inflexible tabulation formats, lack of detail and time sensitivity in data sources. In this project, we explored how much and what types of data are available to describe local housing markets. We obtained, reorganized, categorized, and analyzed data sets from a wide variety of housing-related sources. Finally, we provided a set of housing-related indicators summarized and visualized in a unified format to provide decision-makers with the opportunity of housing status evaluation and comparison among different geographical levels of communities.

AgMRC commodity reports can be used as preliminary research in order to determine current production, market analysis, demographic data, and price points. It can be useful when applying for grants, financial institution loans, and other types of funding. The customizable marketing studies provide market intelligence to Value Added Producer Grant (VAPG) applicants that can be easily incorporated into feasibility studies and business plans that support the application process. Reports will have demographic data (population, race, ethnicity, family structure, income), food data (food deserts, food security, market kinds - schools, restaurants), interactive visualization, and improved geographic filters to offer national and state-level data that can be downloaded as a PDF.

Data on disabilities for practical use by Iowa’s policy makers, advocates, and grant seekers are often difficult to access or displayed independently to one another. This presents a difficulty in fully understanding the complexities surrounding persons with disabilities and their success at employment in Iowa’s workforce. To tackle the accessibility of this data, this project aims to discover, profile, and present data pertaining to successful employment for Iowans with disabilities and to serve as a foundation for connecting various data sources on employment through the assessment of public services available to Iowans with disabilities.

Iowa is currently in need of a data process/platform that will provide more localized and up to date information on regional food systems, specifically information around price points for local products. The Iowa State Farm Food and Enterprise Development (FEED) is frequently asked for benchmarks on pricing of products both in retail and wholesale spaces. There is a need for additional data and research on the potential sales point for these wholesale products when many of our specialty crop producers across the state are operating in direct-to-consumer retail spaces. While data is available from the AMS and USDA (including the Agricultural Census), there is limited aggregation of sales for these products at the local level.

In this project, we aim to understand better what makes a data source reusable to another researcher by focusing on the repository component of the data-sharing ecosystem. We have explored a list of data repositories and looked for the associated metrics that suggest reusing a data source, and analyzed factors associated with higher levels of reuse and potential impact. Our two approaches are getting API requests and HTML scraping, which helped us extract the metrics from the repositories we assigned to, and use correlation plots to analyze the impact of reusability from each metric. Overall, this study is a repository-focused complement to a larger researcher-centered effort to develop a path for accelerating community readiness in creating reusable publicly accessible data products.

The mission of the Iowa Department of Human Rights (IDHR) is to empower underrepresented Iowans through advocating for the elimination of economic, social, and cultural barriers to full participation in civic life. To that aim, we analyzed data and created indicators to identify employment and earnings opportunities for disproportionately impacted communities in Iowa. These communities include racial and ethnic minorities, women, and individuals with disabilities. We also developed a web application to explore language usage across the state of Iowa.

The aim of this project is to develop a series of indicators that identify the post-secondary educational attainment of disproportionately impacted communities in Iowa. The team has investigated data related to educational opportunities, attainment and outcomes of the identified population groups. These data has been cleaned and integrated into a data pipeline. To finally be presented as engaging, unbiased infographics and visuals through a publication series titled Just the Facts.  The team has worked closely with the DHR educational attainment and economic and workforce development teams to collaborate on and share general data resources such as population, demographics and languages spoken that are specifically related to the identified disproportionately impacted populations in Iowa. The team has worked closely with the DHR educational attainment and economic and workforce development teams to collaborate with and share general data resources such as population, demographics and languages spoken that specifically related to the identified disproportionately impacted populations in Iowa.

The purpose of this project was to build an interactive dashboard for Early Childhood Iowa with the capacity to connect with I2D2 and identify national, state, and local sources. We aimed at 22 indicators as our primary data resource of the dashboard, including the data from IDPH, IDSH, CDC, etc. We implemented several tools to scrape the data that we collected from each indicator in a different format, and the dashboard users can pull the data from the dashboard in pdf or CSV file format. Furthermore, we also created various visualizations for the dashboard user to analyze the data more directly.

This project focuses on factors affecting the perception of quality of life in small and shrinking rural communities in Iowa. The goal is to help communities focus their limited resources on improving quality of life rather than using scarce resources to try to grow (as this is unlikely in most towns). Residents and leaders of small rural towns are collaborators and stakeholders of the umbrella NSF project. The team is building a community information ecosystem that will be available through an online web application. This ecosystem makes use of publicly available data and links it to some proprietary data sets to help communities understand, utilize, and collect new data about their towns and peer communities. The ecosystem will use statistical modeling and cutting-edge visualization strategies to make data more accessible to stakeholders in these communities, including city staff, local leaders, and the public.

This project looks at the non-profit organization Eat Greater Des Moines (EGDM) and its food rescue efforts. EGDM takes donations of surplus food from grocery and convenience stores, restaurants, and other locations and transports it to food pantries, non-profits, schools, housing locations, and other organizations that can distribute food to those that need it. In the project, the team used data provided by EGDM and other sources to demonstrate where food rescue currently happens, where it can be expanded, and what areas can benefit most from food rescue. The team has also built a data pipeline and dashboard that is sustainable for EGDM and will be used by the organization moving forward to support their food rescue efforts.