News – Data Dispatch

Data Services Love Data Week 2021

Nicholas Wolf — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 15:57:42 +0000

“Data: Delivering a Better Future” is the theme for this year’s Love Data Week, which will be all-virtual. At NYU, Data Services will be hosting a series of workshops, a Data Science Club Datathon, alumni careers panel, and as always, drawing attention to the need for you to care and feed your research data! Visit our overview of the week’s events for a summary of what’s happening between Feb. 8 and Feb. 12.

There’s still room to sign up for some of our workshops and classes, where you can learn data skills touching on the full range of research needs, from Python and R skills to GIS and qualitative data research. Visit our schedule to find a session.

This year, we are featuring a new event, a Datathon co-hosted by the Data Science Club and Data Services. Our teams are off in pursuit of fabulous prizes, and we wish them luck in tackling one of three projects. You can catch up with the Datathon on its home page at https://nyu-dataservices.github.io/2021-love-datathon.

Love Data Week 2020: Census Edition

Nicholas Wolf — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 20:19:51 +0000

Data Services is hosting a special edition of Love Data Week with a focus on census data. We are hosting a serious of speakers, data providers, and classes focusing on how to use, reuse, and find census data.

To register for events, visit the library signup page.

Among the highlights:

Tuesday, February 11, 1:00-2:00

“Counting New York: NYC Census 2020” [Register]

Julie Menin, Director, NYC Census 2020

Wednesday, February 12, 1:00-2:00

The Economic Census [Register]

Lucia S. Foster, Chief, Center for Economic Studies, Economic Indicators Division (EID), US Census Bureau

Wednesday, February 12, 4:00-5:00

Social Explorer [Register]

Social Explorer offers mapping historical and current U.S. Census Data.

February 13, 2:00-3:00

Data.census.gov [Register]

An interactive portal for accessing and downloading all Census Bureau datasets.

Tutorials

Research Day 2019

Nicholas Wolf — Mon, 28 Oct 2019 02:41:32 +0000

Hosted by Data Services, NYU IT, and NYU Libraries, this event celebrates, builds, and nurtures NYU’s research community by bringing awareness about research technology, showcasing some exciting research being done here at NYU, and featuring cutting-edge tools, services and resources offered by Data Services, Research Technology, Teaching and Learning, and various partners from NYU IT and Libraries.

To learn more and to register, visit the Research Day 2019 homepage.

DH + Data Day 2018

Nicholas Wolf — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 19:08:01 +0000

Co-hosted by Data Services and Digital Scholarship Services, this event celebrates, builds, and nurtures our scholarly community by highlighting digital humanities and data-driven research at New York University. The event showcases interesting research projects across the NYU community and features services offered by Data Services, Digital Scholarship Services, and other branches of NYU Libraries and NYU IT.

Visit the DH + Data Day homepage for the schedule and registration form.

Love Data Week 2018

NYU Libraries — Mon, 05 Feb 2018 15:37:20 +0000

Love Data Week (formerly Love Your Data Week) has arrived! This year’s theme is telling stories with data, and in that spirit Data Services will be hosting a series of workshops designed to think about how you can transform your data, code, and research into effective publications. We’ll look at how you can build an online profile that will allow you to persistently link your publications and data to your researcher identity, and look at ways to ensure you get credit for citations of your research. We’ll cover “executable papers” such as those created in Jupyter Notebooks and R Markdown that enable you to dynamically combine code with research findings, and look at ways to quickly move those papers to the web. We’ll also feature a “Love is in the Air!” day-long mapping event on Wednesday. Look for us on Twitter @nyudataservices to follow along with tips and tools, and right here on the Data Dispatch for more telling stories with data posts. See the schedule below for details and links to sign up.

Events at Bobst Library

Tuesday 13: Storytelling with Code & Data, room 743
3-4:30pm: Tools for Storytelling with Data | Register Here
4:30-6pm: Data Journalism with Meredith Broussard, Assist. Prof, NYU Journalism | Register Here

Wednesday 14: Love is in the Air – Let’s Map It! room 743 & 745
Register Here
9-10am: Evolution of GIS and Mapping
10:15-10:45am: Esri GIS Server
10:45-12pm: Spatial Analytics with ‘Insight’
1:15-4pm: GIS in the Field
4-5:30pm: Python for Spatial Analytics

Friday 16: Data Publishing Basics, room 743
3-4pm: Building a Citation Presence | Register Here
4-5pm: Documenting Your Data | Register Here
5-6pm: Data Publishing Platforms | Register Here

Data Services Adds Aerial Laser and Photogrammetry Data for Dublin, Ireland

NYU Libraries — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 18:30:44 +0000

NYU Data Services is excited to publish a collection of 2015 Aerial Laser and Photogrammetry Survey Data for Dublin City, Ireland in the Spatial Data Repository. This high density dataset was collected in March 2015 by Debra F. Laefer and a team of researchers at NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP). The dataset includes aerial laser scanning (ALS) from 41 flight paths in the form of a 3D point-cloud (LAZ) and 3D full waveform ALS (LAS and Pulsewave), and other imagery data. For more information on this collection, please read the official press release. TechCrunch refers to this set as the “largest LiDAR dataset ever to help urban development.”

Also, refer to the video below for a 3D preview of what the data looks like when visualized.

About the Collection and Data Release

The 2015 LiDAR dataset is a landmark acquisition for geospatial data collections at NYU Libraries. It is the first time since the launch of our new Spatial Data Repository in 2016 that the GIS team has worked with researchers at NYU to bring a complex, multi-format original dataset into our collection. Many thanks to Stephen Balogh, Brittney ONeill, Ahn-Vu Vo, and others who put in incredible amounts of work on organizing the data for release and developing capacity for it.

Because of the size and complexity of the data, we had to take several new steps in order to present the data with enough spatial context to be useful to a range of geospatial researchers. One of the most frequent questions we anticipate about this data is, “what is it, and what can you do with it?” To help, the team has provided a 3D rendering of what the point cloud data looks like when visualized (see below).

This is just one section of point cloud data, which anyone can download and visualize with a library like Potree, though even this visualization is presenting a compressed and down-sampled version of the full waveform LiDAR, which is made available in LAS and Pulsewaves formats. Professor Laefer’s team has provided very robust documentation about the use of this data in research, and its application for urban informatics scholarship. To date, this type of data has been used to explore the detection of road curbs and obstacles, tree growth, and more.

The size and complexity of the data associated with the 2015 aerial laser scan has also required us to revise some of the ways that we have been presenting spatial data. In total, the data associated with just a two square kilometer area in Dublin is well over one terabyte and comes in at least four different formats, including point cloud, full waveform, and infrared GeoTIFF. We needed efficient ways for users to explore smaller subsets of the data and download files efficiently, so we expanded the interface of GeoBlacklight to afford for discovery according to individual flight paths or area of coverage.

A screenshot of the navigation interface for the collection. Users can click on individual tiles or lines (which represent discrete flight paths) in order to download the datasets associated with that area or flight.

Through our spatial discovery application, GeoBlacklight, users can find sections or subsets of the data that are important to them and download accordingly. We hope that this release of LiDAR data benefits the larger geospatial community, and we encourage you to explore the complete collection within NYU’s Spatial Data Repository.