Data@Urban’s Top Posts of 2022

Data@Urban
2 min readDec 15, 2022

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  1. Choosing the right OCR service for extracting text data

Optical character recognition (OCR) services vary by cost, ease of use, confidentiality and ability to handle other types of data. We compared four examples that vary across these dimensions.

2. How can data communicators lead equity awareness and inclusivity efforts for visualizations?

Ensuring inclusivity in data visualization is a constant, ongoing effort, as is our work on the Do No Harm Guide. Answers to five questions from data practitioners and communicators inform this equity awareness work as it grows.

3. The Urban Institute’s continuing journey to develop a highly visible data catalog

We highlight lessons learned about optimizing the catalog and measuring dataset visibility. Although much work remains, Urban’s experience can help other organizations with their own open data journey.

4. Three lessons for measuring rural strengths

To shift away from conventional deficit measurements like poverty, we used the Community Capitals Framework to identify 50 measures of rural strength. We share three lessons on driving asset-focused decisionmaking in rural America.

5. How we designed a user-friendly web data connector

To provide a fast, user-friendly option for accessing the vast treasure of information in the Education Data Portal, we had to understand our user base and their needs before building, testing, and disseminating a Tableau web data connector.

The Data@Urban team:

-Jessica Kelly

-Jon Schwabish

-Jamila Patterson

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Data@Urban

Data@Urban is a place to explore the code, data, products, and processes that bring Urban Institute research to life.