From Homework to Portfolio: NYC Open Data in the Classroom

Welcome back to the show! In this week’s episode, I chat with Christian Martinez, a faculty member at Brooklyn College and several other CUNY schools, and Shannon Joyce, a newly minted master’s graduate in psychological research—who, as we note at the top, literally graduated the day before we recorded. Christian shares how he redesigned his graduate stats and R course around NYC Open Data, building what he calls an “accidental author” process that transforms students’ weekly homework into portfolio books and, ultimately, chapters in a published student gallery. Shannon walks us through her own project exploring the relationship between mold complaints and domestic violence rates in New York City, and reflects on what it means to learn to code by asking questions you actually care about. We also dig into the NYC Open Data R package Christian and his students built together—now streamlined from 40 functions down to three and approaching 2,000 installs—and close with a lively conversation about whether open data skews too negative and what a truly positive city dataset might look like.Keywords: NYC open data, R programming, data visualization, teaching data science, open data, CUNY Brooklyn College, R package, data education, open educational resources, data storytelling, Quarto, RStudio, graduate education, data literacy, public dataSubscribe to the PolicyViz Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.Become a patron of the PolicyViz Podcast (https://patreon.com/policyviz) for as little as a buck a monthFind Christian Martinez and all student work at NYCOpenDataLab.org. Find Shannon Joyce on GitHub (github.com/ShannonJoyce) and LinkedIn.Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, Substack, Twitter, Website, YouTubeEmail: [email protected]