will.i.am and i.am.angel Foundation Promote STEM Education Through GIS

Roosevelt High School students presenting their
GIS projects at the 2013 Esri User Conference.

We're at the Esri International User Conference this week and want to share with you two amazing presentations featuring will.i.am and the i.am.angel Foundation's work to integrate geographic information systems (GIS) with STEM education in the East LA neighborhood of Boyle Heights.

will.i.am at the 2013 Esri User Conference sharing his passion
for transforming his Boyle Heights neighborhood via STEM.

will's vision of transforming inner cities into desired places of living includes getting STEM tools into the hands of students at very young ages, and working with companies to invest in coding rooms instead of just basketball courts and football fields.

The first video ("STEM & GIS in Schools with Amber Case, Charlie Fitzpatrick, i.am.angel and Roosevelt High School," 19:24) shows four Roosevelt High School students and the local problems they visualized with GIS:

• The disparity between race, income, and education as described by Jonathan Kozol in his book Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools
• Access to parks ("We are a park poor community")
• The high level of visual pollution (excess advertising via billboards)
• The proximity of brownfields to students' residences

In the second video ("Special Guest will.i.am and Jack Dangermond," 39:30), will.i.am shares his passion to instill hope and bring real opportunity to neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, the Fifth Ward (Houston), and the Bronx.

To watch the videos, click here. You'll see the plenary videos listed in the center of the screen. Scroll down and look for the titles shown above. It's a bit of effort to find the videos, but worth it.

HealthLandscape is built on the Esri ArcGIS mapping platform. Contact us at info@healthlandscape.org to see how we can help you map your neighborhood.

Infographic or Data Visualization?

What's the difference between an infographic and a data visualization? Robert Kosara, Associate Professor of Computer Science at UNC Charlotte, explains it well on his blog. He says, "The visualization is created by a tool that can be applied to many datasets, the infographic is hand-crafted for a particular dataset."

HealthLandscape creates data visualizations

With HealthLandscape, you can:

• Use the tools again and again for multiple data sets.
• Update your custom map at any time with more current data.
• Interact with your data to better understand it.
• View your data at multiple levels: state, county, census tract, or census block group.
• Add our data layers to your data.

And you can do all of this without being a designer or a GIS professional!

We'd like to help you visualize your data. Contact us at info@healthlandscape.org.

Sidenote: Be sure to read the comments on Robert's post. His ZIPScribble maps are pretty cool too.

Hamilton County Public Health Launches the Community AHEAD Data Portal

Hamilton County Public Health, a public health department that serves more than 460,000 residents in the Greater Cincinnati area, recently partnered with HealthLandscape to create a data portal called Community AHEAD (Community Access to Hamilton County Epidemiology & Assessment Data).

Community AHEAD is a web-based, interactive tool that makes public health data accessible to Greater Cincinnati residents and community leaders. It presents a complete picture of community health at the neighborhood level using maps, charts, graphs, and tables.

Community AHEAD's map view showing neighborhood-level public health data on injuries due to falling.

Community leaders access the data portal to identify and prioritize specific patient populations. Hamilton County Public Health staff epidemiologists maintain and update the data portal regularly, which ensures that the data is current and continually relevant to the communities that Hamilton County Public Health serves.

Community AHEAD grew out of a collaboration between local hospital systems and Hamilton County Public Health. Hospitals, which are required to complete a community health assessment every three years, provided public health information to Hamilton County Public Health, which stored and collected the data. Hamilton County Public Health then worked with our subject matter experts Mark Carrozza and Jené Grandmont to develop Community AHEAD as a means to share the collated data with the reporting hospitals and the community.

HealthLandscape has developed data portals for other agencies, including the Kentucky Primary Care Association. Additional data portals are currently in development. We build the portals on the HealthLandscape platform, which enables us to incorporate the power of geographic information systems (GIS) into each portal.

Contact us at info@healthlandscape to inquire about our data portal development services or call 513.322.5141.