APDU joined co-signing organizations to ask Congress to restore and protect federally-funded data on agency websites and portals. Over 230 organizations and 2,600 individuals signed onto the letter. On February 11, it was transmitted to Senate…
The U.S. Census Bureau released a proof-of-concept data product and documentation for the 2020 Detailed Demographic and Housing Characteristics File B (DDHC-B). The DDHC-B will provide data on housing tenure and household type for just over 1,500 detailed racial…
Katherine Wallman, the former chief statistician of the United States, passed away on January 17, 2024. She was a prominent figure in the data user community, such as serving as a member of the APDU…
This year APDU was bestowed with a grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation to support the travel and conference registration fees for a cohort of promising students interested in public data. These students had the opportunity to meet with board members, engage with conference attendees and speakers, and share their work in our poster session.
The Association of Public Data Users (APDU) is pleased to announce the 2021 Data Viz Awards. We are once again soliciting creative and meaningful graphic designs that use publicly-available data (for example, data from the Census Bureau or Bureau of Labor Statistics) to convey a compelling point or story.
If the mantra in real estate is “location, location, location,” the mantra for public data users is—or should be: “disaggregation, disaggregation, disaggregation.”
Why does disaggregation matter?
On behalf of the Association of Public Data Users (APDU) Board of Directors and staff, I want to wish you a happy new year! I am looking forward to 2022, which will be my second and final term as APDU President.
The tables have turned for workers in a post-pandemic recovery based on crunching the latest jobs and labor data in Public Insight Insight for Work. In the spring of 2020, millions of workers were laid off or terminated. In September 2021, quit rates approached a record high level of just under 3% while layoff rates declined below 1%. Thus, we enter the growing phenomenon of “The Great Resignation”.
The 2021 APDU Annual Conference closed with a panel of federal statistical agency leaders including Dr. Ron Jarmin, Acting Director and Chief Operating Officer of the U.S. Census Bureau; Dr. William Beach, Commissioner at U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; Dr. Mary Bohman, Deputy Director of the Bureau of Economic Analysis; and Dr. Mark Schneider, Director of the Institute of Education Sciences. The panel gathered virtually on July 29, 2021, to discuss the challenges of providing trustworthy, accurate, and timely federal statistical data to the public within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and pandemic recovery.
APDU Board Member Beth Jarosz provides a great overview of the Federal Statistical System in this blog post. She discusses how the agencies are interrelated and how many ways there are for data users to keep up on—and sometimes influence—the changes in the data systems we rely on.
The Association of Public Data Users (APDU) is pleased to announce the 2021 Data Viz Awards. We are once again soliciting creative and meaningful graphic designs that use publicly-available data (for example, data from the Census Bureau or Bureau of Labor Statistics) to convey a compelling point or story.
There are many debates in the world of public data. Privacy vs. accuracy. Survey data vs. administrative data. CSV vs. XLS. But if you really want to see data nerds fight, ask them whether they say “data is” or “data are”. Is the word “data” singular or plural?