DATA PLAYBOOK California Health and Human Services Agency

Resource Library

Below you can explore different data resources. Click on each heading to navigate to each section of resources.

Table of Contents

1. Internal CHHS Strategies and Guidelines

2. Goal Setting

3. Data Sources

4. Introductory Statistics Tools

5. Data Visualization (Beginner to Advanced)

6. Presenting your Data

Internal CHHS Strategies and Guidelines

If you are ever stuck, contact your Department’s data coordinator for information on how to find and exchange CHHS data.

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Goal Setting

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Data Sources

Public data resources are available from a number of online sources, including the federal government and non-profit organizations. Following is a partial list of select data resources that can help contribute to data projects and analyses.

  • USAFacts.org – A data-driven portrait of the American population, our government’s finances, and government’s impact on society that uses federal, state, and local data from over 70 sources.
  • Healthdata.gov – Dedicated to making high value health data more accessible to entrepreneurs, researchers, and policy makers in the hopes of better health outcomes for all.
  • CIA World Fact Book - Provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 world entities.
  • openFDA – Makes it easier to get access to publicly available FDA data. FDA’s goal is to make it simple for an application, mobile device, web developer, or researcher to use data from the FDA.
  • Census Reporter – A Knight News Challenge-funded project to make it easier for journalists to write stories using information from the U.S. Census bureau. Place profiles and comparison pages provide a friendly interface for navigating data, including visualizations for a more useful first look.
  • CalEnviro Screen - A mapping tool that helps identify California communities that are most affected by many sources of pollution, and where people are often especially vulnerable to pollution’s effects.
  • California Healthy Places Index - A tool to explore community conditions that predict life expectancy. It contains user-friendly mapping and data resources at the census tract level across California.
  • CHHS Open Data Portal - Offers access to standardized data that can be easily retrieved, combined, downloaded, sorted, searched, analyzed, redistributed and re-used by individuals, business, researchers, journalists, developers, and government to process, trend, and innovate.

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Introductory Statistics Tools

Here are some key concepts and help integrating them into Excel

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Data Visualization (Beginner to Advanced)

If you just need a quick chart or table, check out these online tools — they are simpler to use than the advanced data visualization guides and may be more appropriate for your specific project:

  • Google Charts (interactive charts & simple data tools)
  • DataWrapper (charts, tables, and maps)
  • Infogram (beginner-friendly, collaborative, focuses on design thinking principles)

More sophisticated guides are listed below:

  • Beginner: databasic.io – A suite of easy-to-use web tools for beginners that introduce concepts of working with data. These simple tools make it easy to work with data in fun ways, so you can learn how to find great stories to tell.
  • Beginner: This article summarizing general Data Visualization strategies and common methods used in different professions and sectors.
  • Beginner: Tableau’s Data Visualization for Beginners: a Definition & Learning Guide with helpful examples
  • Beginner: This Step-by-Step Guide to Data Visualization and Design written for beginners
  • Beginner-Intermediate: Kaggle’s Data Visualization Course teaches you how to implement some more basic, powerful data visualization techniques (line charts, scatter plots, and distributions) and how to choose the right one.
  • Intermediate:Vega – A visualization grammar, a declarative language for creating, saving, and sharing interactive visualization designs. With Vega, you can describe the visual appearance and interactive behavior of a visualization in a JSON format and generate web-based views using Canvas or SVG.
  • Intermediate-Advanced: The Data Visualization Catalogue has a comprehensive list of charts that are separated by what data visualization function they employ.
  • Advanced: D3.js – Data-Driven Documents D3 is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.
  • All levels: Coursera often has free online Data Visualization Courses — check to see if one is available!

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Presenting your Data

  • Color Contrast Grid – Test many foreground and background color combos for compliance with WCAG 2.0 minimum contrast.
  • Use a word editing app like Hemingway to improve the readability of your writing. Hemingway will highlight lengthy or run-on sentences, remove overly dense writing, offer alternatives for weak adverbs and phrases as well as poor formatting choices.
  • Visualize your story with a storyboard (see MIT’s guide to finding a story in your data)

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