On July 13th, the Environmental Impact Data Collaborative (EIDC), in collaboration with Dr. Amy Yeboah Quarkume from Howard University, hosted a virtual event that introduced the EIDC data and coding platform as a teaching tool for courses related to environmental justice, climate change, statistics and data science.
In case you missed the event, you can watch the replay here and find additional resources on our website at https://mdi.georgetown.edu/eidc/classroom/.
The EIDC enables researchers, community groups, and policymakers to analyze and visualize data in ways that help them make environmental policy more effective and just. Over the past year, the EIDC team has gathered and processed environmental data and built a data collaborative that is rich with user-friendly features.
Director Michael Bailey opened by introducing the collaborative’s mission and capabilities. Dr. Amy Yeboah Quarkume, Director of the Data Science program, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Howard University, who has been a strategic partner with the EIDC since the beginning, also shared about her experience incorporating the data platform into her classes and curricula. “With data, solving the intricate problems of climate change cannot be effectively tackled by coders alone,” said Dr. Quarkume. She considers the EIDC as a step towards fostering a collaborative environment of diverse populations, disciplines, and organizations to develop comprehensive solutions to environmental justice and climate change that might benefit more people. EIDC team member Ethan Rodriguez-Shah (MS-DSPP ‘24) then showed specific examples of how to use the platform for such courses. Thereafter, EIDC team member Sanha Tahir (MS-DSPP ‘24) provided specific guidance on how to use the EIDC platform in more technically oriented shared statistics and data science courses.
The event welcomed over 40 professors, faculty directors, researchers, and students from a diverse list of universities both in the US and internationally, with a multitude of domain expertise and interests. Professor Paul Treacy, Associate Faculty Director of the MPP Program at Georgetown, was particularly impressed by the high quality of the data already made available on the platform. Professor Brian An, Director of MSPP Program at Georgia Institute of Technology, shared his interest in the EIDC’s technical capacity as well as the academic resources available to the public. The information session was followed by a productive Q&A segment where the audience members brought in a wide range of queries, including technical and pedagogical ideas.
Check out the video recording of the event below and don’t forget to browse our classroom resources using this link.
About the EIDC: The Environmental Impact Data Collaborative (EIDC) is a platform that enables community groups, policymakers and researchers to use data to learn, communicate and advocate on important environmental issues. The EIDC team gathers data, code and research literature into a single environment, making it easy for users to discover, transform, link, visualize and analyze data in ways that support their efforts to make environmental policy more effective and just.