About

Urban Informatics Updates was launched in 2017 and is written by Deniz Karabakal. In addition to writing this blog, I am a student at the University of Michigan, majoring in Informatics and minoring in Writing.

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I first heard about urban informatics from an unlikely source. Two summers ago, my grandma emailed me an article about smart city technologies. I found this topic fascinating, as it took ideas that I was learning in my major and explored their interesting political, ethical, and cultural implications. As an informatics major, I’m learning how to use computers to analyze and gain insights from large data sets. Urban informatics seeks to apply to apply these skills to better understand and solve problems facing cities.

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This summer, I worked as an intern in the Clinical and Business Intelligence (CBI) department of Munson Medical Center, a hospital in Traverse City, Michigan. The CBI department keeps track of the business side of the hospital – all of the diagnoses and procedures that were done, how much they costed, and who paid for them. I got a sense of how certain health issues affect society as a whole, and how the healthcare industry tries to address them. This got me curious to learn more about public health research, which I didn’t know much about. I thought that it was a very interesting application of what I am studying in college. I thought that it would be interesting to try to incorporate into my Capstone project for the Minor in Writing. Towards the end of the summer, I met Dr. Kelly Hirko, a professor of epidemiology at Michigan State University who was conducting research at Munson, who offered to help me on this writing project.

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I also had been wanting to try my hand at journalistic writing. More specifically, I was interested in data-driven journalism, which tells stories making use of the increasing amounts of data available in our lives. Often data-driven journalism articles make use of data visualizations to explain and contextualize things that are being reported on.

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The capstone project for the minor in writing was an ideal opportunity to investigate the overlap between all of these ideas. At the beginning of the semester, I envisioned writing a long form essay about a health equity issue in a city such as Detroit or Chicago. I also hoped to create an interactive visualization using a JavaScript library such as D3 that would represent my topic. Ultimately these goals proved to be a little too ambitious. I ran into trouble finding publicly available data that would allow me to make a visualization in the way that I had imagined. I also realized that since I was starting the project without a lot of background knowledge on public health, it would be impossible to write a large, original essay about the topic in the time frame that was available to me.

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A turning point in the project was when I attended the Urban Informatics Unconference in October. This gave me the idea to center the project around urban informatics and its effects on public health more generally. I also realized that I had been accumulating a lot of interesting ideas and experiences over the course of my research that didn’t seem to work together as a single essay. Therefore a series of shorter blog posts seemed like an ideal form to present what I have learned about these topics over the course of the semester. And so Urban Informatics Updates was born!