Are you interested in what’s changing in your community?
Durham is changing so fast and it’s sometimes hard to know how and where. What we hear and see is oftentimes part of larger trends occurring and these actually link neighbors across the City - folks who may not yet know one another but share aspirations and face similar struggles. Even with news and social media, personal networks and church, and the old-fashioned grapevine there is still a lot we can learn about the bigger picture.
Welcome to Durham’s Neighborhood Compass, a place for investigating those bigger pictures in our community and sharing what you learn.
The Neighborhood Compass is a primary community resource that allows you to track changes in your community with data; regularly-updated information that often deepens your gut-level understanding that the character of Durham’s neighborhoods is changing.
Each year the Compass grows and learns along with its users, adding data sets with strong community resonance and long-term importance -- it’s a quantitative project with qualitative values.
How to cite the compass
We encourage you to use data from the Durham Neighborhood Compass in your own work. Please credit DataWorks NC and the Durham Neighborhood Compass when you do so, and be sure to cite both the name of the dataset you are accessing as well as the relevant year.
An example citation, in MLA format, is:
DataWorks NC. “Chronic Kidney Disease (Adult Population), 2017.” Durham Neighborhood Compass, compass.durhamnc.gov/en/compass/CKD_TOTAL/tract. Accessed 19 Feb. 2020.
How to use this site
To learn more about how to use the Compass, check out the video tutorials from DataWorks' fall 2019 student interns, Sydney and Jesse.
Get in touch with us
We’d love to hear from you! If you have thoughts or questions about the Compass, click here to share your feedback (opens in new window). You can also contact DataWorks generally at https://dataworks-nc.org/contact/ (opens in new window) and follow us on Twitter at @DataWorks_NC (opens in new window).
For updates about the Compass and DataWorks, sign up for our mailing list:
Credits
The Compass is maintained by DataWorks NC (opens in new window) and Research Action Design (opens in new window) for the City and County of Durham, NC.
The original source code for the Compass is based off of the Mecklenburg Quality of Life Dashboard (opens in new window), developed by Tobin Bradley for Mecklenburg County, NC.
tilde Language Justice Cooperative (opens in new window) leads multilingual strategy for the Compass, with translations by Paper Plane Translations (opens in new window).
Anne Tomasevich (opens in new window) and Alex Manzo (opens in new window) have also provided design & development support.
BrowserStack (opens in new window) and Happo.io (opens in new window) have both provided free open-source credits to the project. We also rely heavily on También dependemos mucho de CircleCI (opens in new window). The Compass is built on VueJS, using Vuetify, MapboxGL JS, and Chartist.
Thanks also to the many Durham residents who have helped out through attending consensus workshops, usability testing sessions, or DataWorks events.
Resources
Other data sources
- City of Durham Open Data Portal (opens in new window) - Durham’s data portal allows you to download a variety of city and county datasets.
- US Census (opens in new window) - The source for much of the Neighborhood Compass data.
- National Historical Geographic Information System (opens in new window) - This site aggregates historical census data for the entire United States, 1790 to the present. Note: registration is required.
- NC OneMap (opens in new window) - State-wide clearinghouse for geographic data.
About Durham
- Health Indicators Project (opens in new window) - Information about health outcomes and determinants at the neighborhood level for Durham.
- Evictions in Durham (opens in new window) - DataWorks’ site with more detailed information about evictions.
- Uneven Ground (opens in new window) Online exhibit about the history of housing in Durham.
- Durham Hoods (opens in new window) - This site aggregates neighborhood mailing lists and has a map of Durham neighborhoods. Note that the neighborhood map contains some inaccuracies.
- Open Durham (opens in new window) - Compendium of historical information about Durham’s neighborhoods and buildings.
