Characteristic NYC Neighborhood Complaints
New York City month continues here at Kieran Healy Industries, an effort that will eventually produce something properly scholarly in nature. But in the meantime—and with my apologies to the many great urbanists of times past—we can enjoy ourselves by messing around with some data. Specifically, New York’s 311 Services and Complaints data. The 311 phone line and website is the the main point of contact for city services when it’s not an emergency. The city logs all the calls it gets and makes anonymized data available publicly via NYC OpenData. I got every record from 2010 to 2025 and packaged it up for R. The package is really just a front-end for a big parquet file managed by DuckDB. DuckDB offers a very powerful in-memory database engine that is optimized for the kinds of thing we want to do in data analysis. That is, we want to efficiently query a big dataset lots of different ways, rather than, say, repeatedly update its records as fast as possible. We can work in R and write tidy dplyr-like queries that get handled by the database. It’s great. ❧ Continue reading…
Dogs of New York, Shapes and Sizes Edition
My recent Dogs of New York, post got circulated a little. On Friday I got a very nice note from William Kornblum, an urban and community studies sociologist who these days is emeritus at CUNY. In the 1980s, Bill studied the people who use Central Park and wrote a report for the Central Park Conservancy. Some of that work counted dog-walkers.
He reminded me that parks in New York City see a lot of dogs. NYC Parks estimates about 1.5 million canine visits to Central Park each year. That is about 4,100 visits a day, to one park. He also asked: ❧ Continue reading…
The Decoupling of Outlet from Impact
Recently I had the happy task of contributing to a forthcoming issue of the American Behavioral Scientist honoring my PhD advisor, Paul DiMaggio. The issue engages with different aspects of Paul’s very varied work in organizations, culture, institutional analysis, and other topics. My contribution, which you can read a draft of here, puts his most-cited paper, DiMaggio and Powell (1983), in the context of other highly-cited articles in sociology since the 1930s and tries to see what that can tell us. It tries to do that through the lens of the paper itself. ❧ Continue reading…
Dogs of New York
I recently updated nycdogs, a data package for R that I originally made for teaching purposes. It bundles up New York City’s dog licensing and dog bite datasets into an R package. The data is already provided by the city in a directly usable way (as CSV files), but packaging it up makes it easier to integrate with other packages and get things moving a little more quickly in class.
The nyc_license table looks like this: ❧ Continue reading…
Steven Lukes, The Diversity of Morals
In August I was a discussant on a panel about Steven Lukes’s recent book, The Diversity of Morals. Here’s an extended version of what I said. A PDF version is available as well.
The Diversity of Morals asks the questions philosophers ask about morality: what is “the moral”? How wide and deep is its diversity? Is there a standpoint from which we can make our judgments? It then refuses to answer them by philosophical methods alone. Instead, it draws on the resources of both social theory and the social sciences, from primatology and anthropology to sociology and political science, in an effort to construct a defensible answer. I do not think it quite succeeds. But I am also unsure of what success would look like. ❧ Continue reading…