You eat where you are.

I have spent the last few days playing with Tableau Public and will certainly continue. I downloaded the spreadsheet, mentioned in the last post, of the Food Environment Atlas data and used it as my source. The map is filtered to the tri-state area and the smallest level of detail is county. The graph is just what it looks like, states and their totals.

For this visualization I chose the data representing population that is classified as low income (from 2000 Census) who live greater than 1-mile from a grocery store (2006 data). Take a few minutes to explore the map and graph. You can manipulate the filters and mouse over dots for data. These were done fairly quickly to explore the Tableau Public interface and publishing features. You can certainly learn some things from this visualization, but it is just a different way of exploring one piece of the Food Environment Atlas' data.

To get a better understanding of the importance of place and food access specific to the Chattanooga area, read the Ochs Center's report on Food Access and Price from last December. These types of indicators contribute to getting an overall picture of a community's health and is apropos to today's Chattanooga Times Free Press which features a map on the front page for their Heavyweight States piece focusing on the tri state area's adult obesity percentages. Take a look at it and compare it with other indicators on the Atlas.

NOTE: The Tableau Public tool is only a few weeks old and might not work with some versions of Safari. I have tested it in Chrome, Firefox, and IE and it seems ok.

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Exploring local food data

With the Georgia Organics conference happening last weekend in Athens and the winners of the Benwood Foundation's Food System Ideas Contest being announced soon, ChattaData has local food on its mind.

Go look at the local food data in the Food Atlas to get a sense of where we are "now". The graphic above is a heat map showing the number of farmers markets, with us having 1-5. (Color selection is a little off with a light cream color next to the grey, oh well.) The sources for this data can be found on the Documentation page. It shows that most of the local food data is from the 2007 Ag Census County data, some from the Census Bureau's Population Estimates, and 2009 Farm to School data compiled by the National Farm to School Network. (More info on their sources is mentioned on the page as well.)

Being someone who has been involved in the local food conversation for a while now, I feel that we have come along way since the 2007 Ag Census. So it will be interesting to see if our color, in the map above, gets a shade darker in the next Ag Census in 2012. I hope so.

Soon, we will take a look at other parts of the Food Atlas, It is a nice, easy tool to use. You can, of course, download a spreadsheet of the dataset for yourself and look at it that way or do something fun with it.

Thoughts on Open Data

I went back and re-read a few articles on Open Data and government transparency this week. You can always start with President Obama's memo on transparency. Then there was a good article in the Washington Post last month on the subject. However, my favorite piece on Open Data right now is this one from Nat Torkington. Among many other good points, he stresses the need for a community of data users to be able to get more value from the datasets released. This hits close to answering a question I have been thinking a lot about, that is, what is the role of, and value to, the individual citizen in the Open Data movement? What do the release of dozens of datasets mean to most people? If you are not an organization or institution that already consumes and analyzes data, then there needs to be something else that helps the individual engage in this movement, and more importantly, to get value from the data and information being released.

What does Open Data mean to you? Do you see yourself gaining value from it? Have you used Data.gov to retrieve any datasets or used any of its tools?

4 idiots of unknown nativity

You too can spend time digging in old census data! This tidbit is from the 1850 census, and the figure is for the whole state, not just Hamilton County. Looks like most of our idiots were homegrown white males. While it is not surprising that such a classification existed 160 years ago, it is fascinating to dwell on, and is a good example of, the subjectivity of data collection and classification. Some census worker(s) in 1850 - Tennessee, matter-of-factly classified these folks as idiotic, a class stated in the directions of the census and one understood in the culture of the day, but were unable to gather where they were from.

(Sidetrack - Idiotic classification/quantification continued for a while, but I haven't looked up the numbers on them. Also, having a family and a job, I must limit my time spent parsing historic figures of idiocy. Perhaps I should be more concerned with the lack of quantification of idiocy in the 2000 census and its certain absence in the 2010 census.)

More census fun and facts to follow. Census.gov is an incredible resource. I find myself going there more and more. Whether it is for historic data, population projections, or shapefiles for GIS use. Spending some time on the site will give you an appreciation of the wealth and value of the information collected, and hopefully influence your decision to be a part of the 2010 census.

This all contributes to what will probably be a continuing topic on ChattaData - the dual role we have as data consumers and generators.

Welcome to ChattaData

ChattaData consists of a Twitter feed and this blog. ChattaData on Twitter will feature data and information about the Chattanooga area. Its people, places, history, events, and any other items of interest. The blog will expand on some of these numbers, but will also reflect my exploration of data and information and how it continues to change our lives. Additionally, public data sources will be discussed as well as data graphing and visualization tools. There are many good resources for these tools out there, but here they will be used to reflect on local and regional data.

These numbers will give us insight into where we are and who we are. Additionally, the sources of these numbers may reveal a regional metadata. That is, information about our available sources of data and information.

In doing all of this, we inevitably learn things about Chattanooga, but this cannot be done without also placing us in the bigger contexts in which Chattanooga lives. Hamilton County, Chattanooga MSA, TN, USA, Spaceship Earth.