Most public data goes unused — not because nobody cares, but because the people who could act on it rarely have the methods to work with it. I have spent part of my career standing in that gap: scoping the question a partner actually needs answered, cleaning and joining the data, and delivering a result they can use without me. Delivery is the step that decides whether any of it helps.
Two kinds of data work live here:
- Civic data — my data-consulting work for the City of Boston through the Boston Area Research Initiative, and the public datasets it produced.
- Research data — datasets I built in the course of my own research and can share.
Published datasets
Three are public, first-authored, and citable today:
- Geographical Infrastructure for the City of Boston, v.2023 — Boston’s places linked across 17 nested geographic levels, from the parcel to the city. With D. Hatten, M. Zoorob, A. Ristea, S. Sheini, and D. T. O’Brien · Harvard Dataverse · doi:10.7910/DVN/KZEERJ
- 2020 Census Geographies for Boston — the city’s 2020 census geographies, cleaned and research-ready. With D. T. O’Brien · Harvard Dataverse · doi:10.7910/DVN/M9F1XY
- COVID-19 Twitter Database — Turkish Sample — tweet IDs and metadata covering a month either side of Turkey’s first case, Feb–Jun 2020. With B. Özturan · Zenodo · doi:10.5281/zenodo.3908982