Below are some of the sources where you may find data about our local community. You are not limited to these, but they are a good place to start.
Note that each source may have specific terms of use of their data, so be sure you understand those before you download anything. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to the HackCulture team.
Champaign County Voter Data
https://uofi.box.com/s/75wgvy38h2bcjbgfn434t6z1p8gimaj7
November 2016 election data for Champaign County was geocoded by students in Professor Bev Wilson’s class, so we have GIS shapefiles that plot the addresses of absentee voters, election day voters, polling places, and places where absentee votes are mailed/processed. The link above is for a zip file on Box, which includes all the data files in a compressed format.
County Clerk Gordy Hulton recorded a video that provides some context for the voter data which you can find in this Google folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1X70X8mKd8EcE9zwiUAZvldzUcifahssS
City of Urbana Open Data
https://data.urbanaillinois.us/
The city of Urbana provides several different types of data on their open data portal for public use. The data sets include: fire & rescue incidents, police incidents, police arrests, city financial data, nuisance complaints, city building water consumption, and community development permits.
Chief Deputy Allen Jones introduced the jail dataset at the kickoff, which is part of the open Urbana data. This data can be found directly at this link: https://data.urbanaillinois.us/Police/CCSO-Jail-Data-through-2016/nxyh-8uib. It includes data through 2016, but they are working on adding 2017 as well.
Urbana CIO Sanford Hess recommends students check out Socrata for analyzing Urbana data: “This is the best place to go for people who want to take our data as a starting point for analysis, but it also requires at least a basic knowledge of the IT tools: https://dev.socrata.com/. For non-technical people, they can just use the basic tools in the Socrata platform, and they can find help on them here: https://support.socrata.com/hc/en-us/categories/360000027108-Data-Visualization-and-Exploration.”
He also recorded a video that provides some context for this data, which can be found in this Google folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1X70X8mKd8EcE9zwiUAZvldzUcifahssS
Champaign County Public Health Database
http://www.c-uphd.org/stats/advanced.php
From the site: “The Champaign County Public Health Database is a comprehensive collection of demographic information, health statistics, health behaviors, and health care utilization indicators of the Champaign County and Champaign-Urbana areas, as well as the State of Illinois and the United States of America.” Data from 1990 to 2010 can be downloaded in .csv files.
Syngenta’s Good Growth Plan Open Data
http://opendata.syngenta.agroknow.com/the-good-growth-plan-progress-data
Brandon Dohman introduced these datasets at the kickoff. Syngenta is a global agriculture company that is also part of Research Park at the University of Illinois. They provide a variety of agricultural data sets (and related documentation) covering topics such as soil, biodiversity, labor standards, and productivity.
CU Citizen Access
http://www.cu-citizenaccess.org/apps-maps-and-data/
From the site: “CU-CitizenAccess is a community online news and information project devoted to investigative and enterprise coverage of social, justice and economic issues in east central Illinois.” Their Apps, Maps, and Visualizations page contains a variety of data collections such as building fires, restaurant complaints, unused vacation days, public housing, and jail inspections.
American FactFinder
https://factfinder.census.gov/
American FactFinder is the comprehensive database where you can find the data sets that correspond to the nearly 100 surveys the U.S. Census Bureau conducts every year. The broadest categories include people, housing, business and industry, and governments; each of these categories includes numerous sub-categories. You can limit to Champaign County (or even census tracts) by selecting it from “Geographies” during the search for data.
Champaign Urbana Urbanized Area Transportation Study (CUUATS)
CUUATS is the transportation entity of the Champaign County Regional Planning Commission, and they provide public access to data sets in the following categories: transportation, transportation improvement projects, land use, and demographics. Most data can be downloaded as a .csv, .kml, or shapefile.
Illinois Department of Transportation
http://apps.dot.illinois.gov/gist2/
IDOT makes highway, railroad, and structure data sets available in the geospatial shapefile format. You can specify Champaign county and what years to download.
Illinois Geospatial Data Clearinghouse
http://clearinghouse.isgs.illinois.edu/
The clearinghouse includes statewide geospatial (GIS) data sets that you can download for mapping a variety of things: climate, elevation, geology, hydrology, infrastructure, and landcover. Additional map data is available in reference types, such as county boundaries, and as aerial imagery.
State of Illinois Data Portal
https://data.illinois.gov/dataset
The state government makes some data available to the public in a variety of categories, such as health, government, natural resources, and safety. Not all data sets may include a local level of detail, so you may also want to search for Champaign and Urbana data.
Professor Matt Turk notes: “I discovered that they recently migrated from one system to another, and some of the datasets were truncated at about 1000 entries. So if participants run into something suspicious like that, it might be a conversion error, and I’ve found their help desk to be really responsive.”