Digital Feed: SAVI: Community Engagement Through Data

On Wednesday, December 5, 2018 at noon, the Digital Scholarship Lab hosted a presentation by Matt Nowlin in the Architecture Building, Room 004 on SAVI, a community planning and assessment tool developed by the POLIS Center at IUPUI. SAVI mobilizes data from many sources to power spatially-based analytical tools and supports community-centered social research in the Indianapolis area. Nonprofits, governments, and citizens have used SAVI to plan, to secure and target resources, and to advocate. Recent SAVI projects have investigated food insecurity, fire department resource allocation, mass transit ridership, domestic violence, sociodemographic change in schools, and neighborhood transformations. POLIS Center Research Analyst Matt Nowlin introduced SAVI and demonstrated some of its uses. He also discussed the challenges and opportunities that come with creating actionable information from diverse data sources and presenting it using geospatial technologies.