About the project

The project grew out of the desire to make a dashboard focused on North Carolina using datasets that are not conventionally used in urban planning. The primary purpose is to provide public and policy makers an up to date set of indicators that help guide decisions. We bring together high-cadence but ‘flawed’ data sets that have wide spatial and temporal coverage.

We acquire data from a number of different sources. These datasets are cleaned, transformed and summarized by our talented team to create consistent visualisations. The data are collected using different methods: administrative records, sensors, web scraping, satellite images. They have different temporal and spatial coverage and resolutions. As such, we strongly urge the users to read through the metadata to understand the limitations and potential uses each datasets.

We also provide interpretations of some of the datasets in the stories. These are our interpretations of the datasets. We provide the processed datasets for download in the ‘About’ pages of each datasets. The users are welcome to draw their own interpretations.

We encourage you to use our data and visualizations. If you do, please note the ShareAlike provision of the Creative Commons license. Please do not repost verbatim text without permission. Note that Attribution is part of the Creative Commons license. Please cite the platform as:

Department of City & Regional Planning (2020). Carolina Tracker: A Resource for Recovery, https://carolinatracker.unc.edu/. Accessed on [date here]. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.