For the OKC SPI session, Research Team will be presenting a start-to-finish guide on the entire process of taking a research question and turning it into data-based visualizations and analyses, using Oklahoma City traffic citation data as a case study. We will cover how to search for public data, both in the criminal justice space and in others, as well as the basics of how to analyze that data in R, including turning it charts, tables, and maps. By the end, attendees will have a list of useful data sources and knowledge on how to find new ones, a basic understanding of how to make use of them using R or Excel, and the answer to our research question -- "in Oklahoma City, what color and type of car gets ticketed the most?"
Details TBA!
🤓 Handy sources of public policy data:
- Federal Election Commission -- federal campaign finance contributions
- The Oklahoma Ethics Commission's "Guardian System" -- state level campaign finance contributions
- US Census -- tons of data on who lives where and what their lives are like, with a great search interface
- Also available via the {tidycensus} package for R
- The {tigris} package -- shapefiles for mapping various US jurisdictions
🥳 Other fun / useful data sources:
- The "Sports Dataverse" -- a family of R packages for finding and analyzing sports data from football, basketball, hockey, chess, and others
- The American National Election Studies -- a widely-used academic source of data on Americans' political attitudes and behaviors, going back decades
- The {rtweet} package -- an R package for downloading data from Twitter (WARNING: recent and ongoing changes to Twitter's API have disrupted some of this package's functions)
- The {rvest} package -- an R package for scraping data from websites
📚 R Books:
- "R for Data Science" -- the industry-standard guide to R. It can teach you how to do everything in this repo and much more (available for free online)
- The R Graphics Cookbook -- a detailed guide to styling R plots and other graphics (available for free online)
- The Posit Library -- a collection of books covering everything from generating websites with {bookdown} to finance analysis with {shiny}. Includes both of the above (all available for free online)
- The Big Book of R -- a curated and massive list of free R books and tutorials, curated by data scientist Oscar Baruffa.
🧑🏫 R Tutorials:
- {swirl} -- an R package designed to teach R interactively (free)
- Datacamp and Code Academy -- two popular online R courses (they cost money, however)