1 Welcome

Welcome to the Urban Informatics Toolkit. This online book is intended to serve as an effective introduction to the understanding and analysis of the urban commons. In it you will find material on the theoretical underpinnings of Urban Informatics and an introduction to the statistical programming language R which will allow you to work confidently with the data you will encounter in your research, coursework, or elsewhere.

This book is many things at once. Within it are two years of study in the Urban Informatics Program at Northeastern University, five years of self-directed education in R, two years of teaching R, and innumerable hours of frustration spent attempting to understand what could otherwise have been a very digestible language.

I will do my best to avoid overly technical and verbose descriptions of theory and concepts. I will attempt to explain everything as I would to a friend.

By the end of these pages I hope that you will have become self-sufficient in your analyses. My intention is not to teach you everything that you will need to know because this is impossible. Data analytics are always changing and what is current will be dated by tomorrow. As I wrote this, in fact, one of the most commonly used tools was altered to such a degree that much of what I had already written became dated. The purpose of this book, then, is not to brief you on the latest developments, but to equip you with the proper tools with which navigate a rapidly evolving field.

This book has three goals. First, to ensure in the reader an understanding of the fundamentals of scientific inquiry in the Big Data era. Second, to familiarize the reader with effective approaches to data analysis. And third, to equip the reader with enough knowledge of R that they might understand what’s been happening under the hood, so to speak.