In place of my usual data update, I’d like to start 2018 off with our first data release. This release, which is available on Jane’s new Resources page, highlights some of the leg work we’ve done so far. It is our hope that others might use our work for their own research, study, and discussion purposes.

The University of Wisconsin’s (UW-Madison) crime log data is freely available on the campus police department’s (UWPD) website, though the site only displays the past 60-days worth of data at any given time. Requests for older logs–provided in the form of PDFs–are promptly filled by the department. To make this data more easily accessible to researchers and others interested in using the data, we’ve made the crime logs available in the form of .xlsx, .ods, .csv and .html files. Each file includes all available data points for three consecutive academic years: FA16-SU17; FA15-SU16; and FA14-SU15.

Notes for “Daily campus crime log” files:

• Some words are cut off in the original PDFs and are thus cut off in the new file formats
• Typos and other inconsistencies have not been corrected
• Duplicate entries exist, as each PDF represents a 60-day snapshot of the log
• An additional column, date_extracted, has been added to the new formats; date_extracted denotes the date of the original PDF on which the entry appears

Next, we deduped the new formats by event_number, date_reported, date_occurred, report_number, location, offense, and disposition. Deduputing resulted in the following:

• Sept 1, 2016-Aug 31, 2017: decreased from 4085 to 2149 entries
• Sept 1, 2015-Aug 31, 2016: decreased from 2785 to 1401 entries
• Sept 1, 2014-Aug 31, 2015: decreased from 2996 to 1603 entries

Notes for “Dedupe of daily campus crime logs” files:

• date_extracted has been excluded from the dedupe process
• There may be more than one entry for a single incident if disposition changed over time

The last dataset available (as of the date of this blog post) is noted as “Clery data.” This set includes any entry that references sexual assault, domestic or dating violence, or stalking as the offense.

Notes for “Clery data” files:

• Leading and trailing white spaces have been trimmed
• Typos and inconsistencies have been corrected using OpenRefine
  • FA16-SU17 cluster by offense; key collision, cologne-phonetic (1 error resolved)
  • FA16-SU17 cluster by offense; nearest neighbor, levenshtein (1 error resolved)
  • FA16-SU17 cluster by location; key collision, ngram-fingerprint (1 match)
  • FA15-SU16 cluster by offense; key collision, ngram-fingerprint (1 error resolved)
  • FA15-SU16 cluster by location; key collision, ngram-fingerprint (1 error resolved)
  • FA14-SU15 cluster by offense nearest neighbor, levenshtein (3 errors resolved)
  • FA14-SU15 cluster by location; key collision, metaphone3 (1 error resolved)
• Some typos have been corrected (e.g. VIOLENC is edited to VIOLENCE)
• time_reported  has been split into date and time
• time_occurred has been split into date and time; spaces were removed to simplify this process

For more on the Clery Crime Data Visualization Project data, check out last year’s November and December data updates or contact us at jane@janespeaks.org for more information. Check back again next month for Jane’s newest update.

In last month’s data update on the Clery Crime Data Visualization Project, we described our next step simply as “review[ing] the data.” With three year’s worth of Clery crime data from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department (UWPD), we’re ready to do just that. Unfortunately for Jane, there’s nothing simple about it.

After stripping the UWPD crime log data out of PDFs, sorting the data by offense, and deleting duplicate entries, we’re left with 219 incidences of sexual assault, domestic or dating violence, and stalking reported on or near the campus—or so we thought. As it turns out though, there is still much to be done and a number of decisions that Jane will have to make regarding the data.

Let’s look at some of Jane’s challenges:

Disposition – “The current status of a particular crime report. Dispositions are updated within two business days of when a change is made, until 60 days from when the Time Reported, when the crime is removed from the Clery Crime & Fire Log (Log).”

When deleting duplicates, we merely removed identical entries. This seemed easy enough.  However, it appears that disposition—per the definition above—may be updated for a limited time. The result of which is, in some cases, a second almost-but-not-quite-identical entry with a revised disposition (as Jane was provided monthly PDF copies of the crime log that contain both the original and the updated entry for disposition). So, Jane will now have to go back and discern how this impacts our data.

Offense – “The nature of the crime committed. One criminal incident may lead to multiple offenses noted in the Log under one Report #. For instance, an incident in which one person procured liquor for another while using false identification will be listed under two rows as two crimes, False ID Possession and Underage Liquor Procurement.”

As clearly stated in UWPD’s glossary of Clery terms, a single criminal incident can result in more than one entry in the crime log. Indeed, Jane has come across this. The big question is whether to display each crime individually, or to display concurrent criminal acts as a single incident.

Date Occurred – “The date and time that a crime was reported to have occurred. When a particular date and time is unknown, an estimate is provided. If an estimate is impossible, Time Occurred is listed as Unknown.”

While most crimes are documented as occurring on a specific day or within a defined date range, some entries name the month, semester, or–in rare incidences–the year in which the crime occurred, if known at all. Likewise, specific times are sometimes provided; other times, time ranges or no data is given. Jane suspects that this practice of estimating when a crime occurred will complicate how we might display or filter the data.

Location – “The street address or intersection where a crime was reported to be committed.”

While the location data is largely straightforward and useful, Jane will also have to consider how to treat entries such as “on campus,” “on campus residence hall,” “on campus, student housing,” or “off campus.” Some useful definitions are provided in  the 2017 Annual Security Report & Annual Fire Safety Report, though it is still unclear how these entries will impact Jane’s efforts to visually display location data.

For more on the Clery Crime Data Visualization Project, check back in with us again next month for our latest data update. We’ll start examining the data a little closer, and explore the feasibility and utility of visually displaying data. See you in the new year!

For the past few weeks, Jane has been working on a data visualization project that takes publicly available UW-Madison campus crime data—collected under the Clery Act—and displays said data in a variety of ways. With the help of the UW-Madison Police Department (UWPD) and UW-Madison Libraries we’ve made some good progress, and hope to create our first infographic soon.

According to the Clery Center:

“The Clery Act requires colleges and universities that receive federal funding to disseminate a public annual security report (ASR) to employees and students every October 1st. This ASR must include statistics of campus crime for the preceding 3 calendar years, plus details about efforts taken to improve campus safety.

ASRs must also include policy statements regarding (but not limited to) crime reporting, campus facility security and access, law enforcement authority, incidence of alcohol and drug use, and the prevention of/response to sexual assault, domestic or dating violence, and stalking.”

Crime data at UW-Madison is retained in the form of a crime log and contains the nature, date, time, and location of each crime. The UW-Madison Police Department shares their daily crime log online (which contains the past 60 days of data) and publishes their annual security report each October, in accordance with the law. The most recent report, the 2017 Annual Security Report & Annual Fire Safety Report, is available here. Thus far, Jane has requested two years worth of crime log data (Sep 1, 2015 – Aug 31, 2017) from UWPD; they have provided the requested crime logs, in the form of PDFs, without delay.

Our first challenge in sorting through the logs was to pull data from the PDFs into a spreadsheet. We used Tabula, a “tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files,” to extract event #, date reported, date occurred, report #, location, offense, and disposition of each entry. While the first year’s worth of data was quite easily extracted; the second year presented a number of problems, such as unexpected blank fields, misaligned columns, and differently formatted PDF files—all of which complicated the process a bit. Once the data was imported into our spreadsheet, we used Excel to delete thousands of duplicate entries; luckily, Excel makes short change of duplicates.

Our next hurdle was to clean and organize the data. With over 3,500 entries remaining, we needed a way to easily correct typos, address inconsistencies, and separate data into multiple columns. OpenRefine proved ideal for our needs. The software also allowed us to parse subsets of data by offense. To date, we have identified 161 incidences of actual or attempted sexual assault, domestic or dating violence, or stalking that had been reported on or near campus during the two-year report period. (This number includes all incidences reported to UWPD; however, because the date occurred, location, and disposition data has not yet been reviewed, numbers may not align with those distributed by UWPD via the annual security report.) Jane will be requesting a third year’s worth of data shortly.

Our next step is to review this data and explore different ways of visually displaying the data points. While we know that sexual assault is notoriously underreported, it is Jane’s hope that by providing access to data-driven informational resources, such as infographics, we might encourage and support campus efforts to further discussion around sexual assault on college campuses.

Stay tuned for more on our data visualizations.

Many thanks to UW-Madison iSchool Faculty Associates Browen Masemann and Dorothea Salo, iSchool Lecturer and Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research Head Film Archivist Amy Sloper, and Digital Curation Librarian Cameron Cook for hosting a “Collections Carpentry Workshop” and introducing Jane to Tabula and OpenRefine.

Please join us in thanking the Pollination Project, a truly compassionate and inspiring foundation, for awarding The Jane Speaks Initiative a 2017 Seed Grant – funding that supports small organizations and committed individuals who are making a difference in their communities. We are honored to accept this grant, and look forward to putting the donation to good use. If you would like to support us in our work, please consider donating to our very first funding campaign to support the design and production of a public collections website.

How should academic communities come together to preserve and memorialize artifacts of sexual violence? Amidst heightened public concern and activism around campus sexual assault, faculty, students, librarians, and archivists from the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library have come together to offer an inspiring and creative answer with Take Back the Archive. This public history project documents and contextualizes the history of rape and sexual violence at UVa.
Archival material ranges from a 2014 article in Rolling Stone to a 1988 program from the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault’s annual conference and meeting. While the archive currently only holds select institutional collections, plans are in the works to include crowd-sourced material. This is what I love most about the project – that it offers a safe space and platform for survivors and allies to browse and share documents, images, artifacts, ephemera, and even personal stories. While we wait to see the fruits of the project’s crowd-sourcing efforts, there is enough material here to inspire adaptation by public historians, feminist scholars, and digital archivists across the country. How is your college or university working to preserve and memorialize its institutional history of sexual violence? The more colleges we see engaging with their histories, the more we can trace local, regional, and national trends. Understanding these patterns may be what it takes to help put a stop to today’s rape culture.

Stacy Williams, a self-described librarian, archivist, editor, and essayist, opened the 2016 Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum with a speech titled “All Labor is Local.” The purpose of her talk was to “explore the ways in which we, as employees and employers, apply our local experiences to how we perform the labor in libraries and archives, and what we can do to broaden those perspectives to be more inclusive of the communities we hope to serve.” It wasn’t only her conclusions that sparked my interest; it was one of her fundamental arguments that really drew me in—that local care work, particularly that provided by women, is “the beam underpinning this entire system of labor as we know it… And yet, it remains the most invisible part of what makes our economy run.”Continue reading →