Charts and Graphs

Like other statistics portals, we offer variants of the traditional statistical charts and graphs. We do, however, try to keep these as intuitive and as simple as possible. Our philosophy is that anyone who wants to do complex representations of the data should be able to download the data and do those analyses themselves.

Given the nature of our data we typically offer percentage-based summary, frequency and cross-tabulation charts. A summary chart takes some piece of information (say, votes) and summarizes that data into groups (such as total election, wards, precincts) by adding together all the votes according to some grouping rules.

Frequency analyses use the same data as summary analysis but rather than sum the total votes, they define rules for categorizing the data, rules for grouping the data and then give you the count of units within each group that match the criteria.

An example should clarify the difference, if you viewed a frequency analysis based on vote percentages of a particular candidate in Chicago and examined the data at the ward grouping level, the frequency table would have 10 rows and would tell you how many wards had republican voting percentages of less than 10%, <10 to <20%, 20 to <30%, etc. If you looked at the same data in a summary table you would have a row per ward and the percentage of votes received. Both are useful in their own way (todo specify).

Cross-tabulations (a.k.a. cross-tabs or contingency tables) are easy to understand once you understand frequency tables. Where frequency tables show how many items match a particular rule, cross-tabulations add an additional category rule and return a matrix of counts. For instance, if you wanted to see the number of people who voted for Mayor Daley and versus the percentage of people who live in poverty in the ward. So, at the end, the results would have breakdowns of poverty along the columns and breakdowns of elections along the rows and counts/percentages of wards that met both categorization criteria.

Maps / GIS Systems

In addition to standard chart and graph representation of statistics, we also offer representations in map form for most of our statistical data. In addition to the maps of political data, we offer a subset of the US census data for Chicago in chart, graph and map form as well.

Special thanks go to Social Science Computing Services at the University of Chicago supplying the geographic boundary files for all the different political areas in Chicago.

At present, we are applying for more funding in order to offer more sophisticated geographic information systems analyses.

Document and multimedia indexes

One of the long-term goals of the Chicago Democracy Project is to provide indexes of important documents regarding issues of race, politics and social justice. We are proud to begin this process with an index of the Diaspora project at Northwestern University. The diaspora collection consists of still images, historical profiles of important events, people and groups of the African diaspora. We allow searching on both the titles and categories associated with these files in addition to allowing you to browse their data w/ the ease and comfort with which you can browse our own data.

In addition to historical and multimedia documents, we are also asking university faculty, community leaders and students to submit annotated bibliographies in their area of expertise. Ideally, each entry would contain both a summary and an assessment of the book, article or web resource. Detailed critical notes are also welcome. If you have a bibliography that you would like to submit, please contact at the contributions page.

We are currently searching for other indexes of documents and in particular multimedia objects. If you would like to make a contribution, please do so here: Contributions

Data services

Data Downloads

As a registered user, you may download any of our publicly accessible databases in order to perform your own analyses. We would only ask that any interesting findings, if published, properly credit the CDP as the source of the data. We would also suggest that as an upstanding member of the community you might share your analytical insights by contributing back your analyses or even additional data back to the CDP.

Submit your own data

We encourage community activists, academics and other concerned citizens to contribute machine-readable forms of public domain data (elections, city statistics, data made legally public by the original copyright holder, or data for which the contributer is the copyright holder). We are relatively flexible about the format, though we prefer text files with SPSS or SAS coding / data import scripts. However, any interesting data that is documented well would be appreciated.

Secure access to your data

If you do decide to contribute data to the CDP (and we hope you do) you may choose to contribute the data with sophisticated security controls. For instance, you may want to only allow summaries of your data but not downloads. Furthermore, you may want to restrict access to particular users (your colleagues, your students) or to particular types of users (students only, e.g.). You may also specify fine-grained security starting at the 'source' level (i.e. your data becomes a 'source' given our browsing metaphors) down to the field level. For your convenience, you can set these permissions using our on-line access control list service or for the more technical minded you can submit and access control list via properties file (proprietary format on our part, please contact us for the format).

Links to your data

As another option, you may keep your data hosted on your own site but submit a list of links and some data about your data (called metadata). You may also choose to do a mixed solution where on the one hand you submit some 'raw' data to us so it can be summarized statistically or geographically (via maps). Then, on the other hand, submit links to the original source of the data so that users who browse to your information via the CDP index will be directed back to the proper spot on your site. For instance, this is how the Northwestern University Data is managed, they provided us w/ categories and text to index but any interested party is directed back to their site for full access to the information.