A Sleek New Data Portal Puts Chicago Demographics At Your Fingertips

By Austin Brown in News on Apr 6, 2016 5:39PM

Public data is all the rage right now. Between census figures, a trove of police misconduct files released last year, the city's own data portal, and the results of many Freedom of Information Act requests, the average citizen may have more trouble figuring out how to interpret all that information than ever before.

Enter DataUSA, a new tool from MIT's Media Labs and Deloitte meant to visualize civic data and make it more accessible to the average user.

The tool is a handy shortcut to information on Chicago's demographics, size, employment and even preferred modes of transportation. So if you've ever wanted to know exactly how many people majored in Interior Design in Chicago last year (108) or what ethnicity Chicago has a the most relatively high percentage of (Polish), along with more sobering statistics—such as the fact that some 23 percent of residents officially below the poverty line—this website makes it all accessible, organized, and readable to anyone interested enough to look.

In an interview with the New York Times, Cesar A. Hidalgo, the leader of the project and assistant professor at M.I.T., said that the purpose of the project was to "transform data into stories." To that effect, on the homepage of DataUSA one can find sections for "Racial Breakdown of Poverty in Flint, Michigan" and "Gender Wage Gap in Connecticut," indicators of where the data available might be able to be organized for those who feel compelled.

Those involved in the project made efforts to focus on the most compelling civic data. Deloitte, a consulting firm, was brought in to offer insights on what it felt researchers and business owners might most want to see in civic data visualizations, and the code used to make the website is open source, making it easy for developers and data analysts to make their own tools and insert their own data to use, or to convert the data available into their own research. With all these efforts to make data accessible and interpretable, DataUSA hopes to lead to new insights across all types of fields, from journalism, to education, to policymaking.

Play around with the data portal to see what you discover. For example, we learned that Chicago's median household income is $48,734, the median age of Chicago's residents is 33.9, and, on average, Chicago's universities are graduating more women than men.