{uitk} is a package to go along with the Urban Informatics Toolkit (U), an open text for the Northeastern Course SPPUA 5262 Big Data for Cities. The package contains datasets in the online text as well as a number of tutorials to accompany the code examples in the book.

This package does not yet exist on CRAN and must be installed directly from Github.

remotes::install_github("josiahparry/uitk")

• Substantive readings
  • Utility and Danger of Big Data
  • Data in the Municipal Context
  • Schools of Urban Informatics
• Technical readings
  • Read UITK Ch. 2: This chapter will introduce you to R, and the RStudio IDE.
  • Install R
  • Install RStudio
  • Pre-course survey

• Substantive readings
  • Is the Cost of 311 Systems Worth the Price of - Knowing?
  • What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal about New - York
  • How Public Data Can Improve Services and Empower - Communities
  • NYC’s Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics
• Technical readings
  • Tidyverse style guide chapters 1 and 2
  • UITK:
    • R as a calculator
    • Reading Data
    • Exploratory Visual Analysis
    • General Data Manipulation
  • Lander: Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5.1, 6

• Substantive readings
  • “Towards a comparative science of cities: Using mobile traffic records in New York, London, and Hong Kong.” by Grauwin et al.
  • Senseable Cities at MIT
• Technical readings
  • Lander: Chapters 3, 7, 15.1
  • Tidy Data, Wickham
  • UITK:
    • That’s too much data
    • The %>%

• Substantive readings
  • LinkNYC
  • Sidewalk Labs
  • Sidewalk Toronto
  • “Smart City Playbook” by the Mayor’s Office of Urban Mechanics in Boston
  • “Google’s Guinea-Pig City” by Molly Sauter, The Atlantic
• Technical readings
  • Lander: Chapters 9, 11.1
  • Creating New Measures
  • Grammar of layered graphics
  • Visualizing Trends and Relationships I
  • Visualizing Trends and Relationships II

• Substantive readings
  • “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” by Chris Anderson, Wired.
  • “The End of Theory in Science?” by Massimo Pigliucci, EMBO Reports.
• Technical readings

• Substantive readings
  • O’Brien 2018 The Urban Commons Chapter 2: Through pg. 65 and 85-90 required; summary sections for the rest of the chapter will suffice.
• Technical readings

• Substantive readings
  • Culhane et al. (2007). “Testing a typology of family homelessness based on patterns of public shelter utilization in four U.S. jurisdictions”
  • Bowden et al. (2020). “Case identification of mental health and related problems in children and young people using the New Zealand Integrated Data Infrastructure.”
  • And peruse Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy.
• Technical readings
  • Lander: Chapters 11.2, 12.1
  • UITK:
    • Summary Statistics
    • Summarizing the tidy way
  • R4DS - Grouped summarise with summarise()

• Substantive readings
  • Rogers (2013). “John Snow’s data journalism: the cholera map that changed the world.”
  • Palominos & Smith (2020). “Identifying and Characterising Active Travel Corridors for London in Response to COVID-19 Using Shortest Path and Streetspace Analysis.”
  • The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis
• Technical readings
  • UITK - Spatial Analysis

• Substantive readings
  • Boyd & Crawford 2011 Six provocations for big data
• Technical readings

• Substantive readings
  • Bettencourt et al 2010 Urban scaling and its deviations Revealing the structure of wealth, innovation and crime across cities
  • Santa Fe Institute’s Program on Cities, Scaling, and Sustainability
• Technical readings
  • Lander: Chapter 15.2
  • UITK - Statistics

• Substantive readings
  • Life in the City is Essentially One Giant Math Problem by Jerry Alder, Smithsonian Magazine
  • Hudson Yards: The First Quantified Community
  • University of Chicago to Serve as Test Bed for Array of Things
  • Center for Urban Science and Progress
  • Urban Center for Computation and Data
• Technical readings
  • Lander: Chapter 15.3

• Substantive readings
  • Sun et al. 2015 Quantifying long-term evolution of intra-urban spatial interaction
  • The Future Cities Lab
• Technical readings

• Substantive readings
  • Townsend 2015 Making sense of the new urban science
  • Data for Black Lives
  • Detroit Community Technology Project
  • Vital Village
  • MetroLab Network’s Innovation of the Month
• Technical readings