This project will produce a new online portal of data, analytic tools, and research studies that will advance the urban sciences and improve the capacity for urban governance in the digital age. The Portal to Data and Analysis Tools, or P-DAT, builds on the Boston Area Research Initiative, an inter-university partnership that conducts a comprehensive urban research agenda. The portal will integrate large-scale administrative, social media, and mobile phone data across time and space in greater Boston; develop analytic tools that transform the data into research-ready forms; and create an interactive context where the data can be browsed, merged, mapped, analyzed, and downloaded. The online portal will offer a real-time window into the social, behavioral, and economic dynamics of the city, thus permitting users to address a broad range of questions in the urban sciences that previously they could not. Because cities like Boston constitute a stage upon which nearly all aspects of human behavior occur, played out across the diversity of neighborhoods and social contexts that constitute the urban landscape, P-DAT will not only advance our understanding of the city, but also of human behavior and society more broadly.
The data sources that will be united in the online portal include millions of requests by citizens for government services (by type), crime incidents, health emergencies, census data over time, millions of social media posts, both public and private transportation use, and GPS tracking of cell phone use. To make these data accessible, P-DAT will develop analytic tools, or econometrics, that will translate the raw data into reliable and valid measures of the physical and social characteristics of the Boston metropolitan area¡¦s ecology, be it an address, street, or neighborhood. Tools that automatically generate these measures and then merge them according to shared geographic referents will be a critical part of the portal's infrastructure and documentation, creating a cumulative body of knowledge and facilitating analysis across data sources. The project will also demonstrate the utility of the data portal by addressing core scientific questions on the social structure and dynamics of the urban processes. Theoretically motivated questions to be studied include the sources and consequences of how neighborhoods are socially and physically organized, the nature of social and economic exchanges between neighborhoods (e.g., commuting patterns and human activity flows), and how the institutions of a city (e.g., police, schools, health agencies) interact with local neighborhoods. All analysis results and data will be made public in a usable form to both researchers and policymakers.
