Boston neighborhoods talk
If a neighborhood could talk, what would it tell you about its citizens, its resources? A lot, it turns out, as the newly launched website of the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI) makes clear. By offering aggregated datasets and mapping tools, the site is a platform and a network through which to share information about Boston’s people, places, and events. BARI, an inter-university research partnership led by Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study with the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston and the city of Boston, held “Teaching Boston,” a workshop that introduced an array of Web tools and data to a packed room at Boston City Hall on Friday. The nearly 60 participants included city officials, representatives from local nonprofits, and 35 faculty members from eight area universities who are all teaching courses about Boston. This was an unprecedented collaborative endeavor for Boston and the people who teach about the city, noted Bill...