New Dashboard Helps Researchers Study the Existential Issues of Our Time

The Digital Solutions Studio built the St. Louis Data Dashboard in less than 12 months — an endeavor that would’ve otherwise taken three to five years.

Political science professor Andrew Reeves, PhD, says he and fellow Washington University researchers are incredibly fortunate to have access to the Digital Solutions Studio (DSS). What can essentially be described as WashU’s very own software development agency, the DSS works with faculty to make their data more digitally accessible to the public and other scholars.

“It’s like giving researchers and grant seekers a superpower,” says Reeves, director of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy. “At only a few of the most elite academic institutions can academics get this kind of support.”

For Reeves, support from the DSS meant having a fully functioning, complex data dashboard designed and built in less than 12 months, a project he says would’ve taken him and his team three to five years to build otherwise. Even then, it probably wouldn’t have been as functional as it is today. 

“Without the DSS, we probably would’ve hired a graduate student or two, and it would’ve been much more of a modest endeavor,” Reeves says. “We would have made all the functionality and design decisions ourselves, which would’ve meant a much less elegant product than what the DSS has built.”

Devising the St. Louis Data Dashboard

Reeves’ partnership with co-lead researchers Scott Krummenacher, Matthew Gabel, and Elizabeth Korver-Glenn grew out of a call for proposals from the Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures for collaborative work between arts and sciences. What resulted was the St. Louis Policy Initiative, which brings diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives to study policy in our region.

“We came together as a group of social scientists — people in environmental policy, people doing work in public health and me, a political scientist — and we each had research questions around these existential problems of our time, such as climate change, housing, and public health,” Reeves says. “We knew you couldn’t consider any of these questions in a vacuum. And yet, there was no easy way to share data in a way that’s usable for everyone involved.”

To enable their research, Reeves and his co-leads decided to build a data dashboard to make it easier for researchers to be able to study policy in the region. It would need to be publicly accessible and user friendly while also being a repository for all sorts of data about St. Louis and St. Louis County, including census data, local election results, 311 call statistics, and more. 

The Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures identified the St. Louis Policy Initiative as the first project to pilot DSS’s services. Reeves worked closely with Albert M. Lai, PhD, deputy faculty lead for Digital Transformation, and his team to develop the St. Louis Data Dashboard.

Making a True Impact 

To say Reeves and his team were impressed with DSS’s work is an understatement.

“Software development and web design are skillsets most academics don’t possess,” Reeves says. “Having someone help with the design, the project management, etc., in such a bold and competent way — it was really like being strapped into a rocket. That’s how much it advanced our project.”

Reeves says the policy dashboard will save researchers, policymakers, city planners, nonprofit groups, and a host of other stakeholders valuable time by serving up data and statistics in an easily accessible way. He also anticipates the dashboard will help him and his colleagues attract additional funding to the St. Louis Policy Initiative. 

“As far as the returns on grants go, I think the potential is quite high,” Reeves says. “Every project we apply for, we can say we have this publicly accessible infrastructure in place that allows us to give back to the community what we’ve learned in a really nice, advanced way. It really puts the cherry on top of each of our grant applications.”