Centralizing Data Collection
Semester: Spring 2025
Praxis Course: DSCI 310: Data in Action
Faculty Advisor: Jennifer Spohrer
Field Site: Harriton House
Field Supervisor: Laura Carpenter
Praxis Poster:
DSCI_Harriton House Praxis Poster_Revised
Further Context:
For this project, we collaborated with Harriton House, a historic house near the college that housed many influential figures, including Charles Thompson. The Harriton Association maintains it and was seeking access to funding so that it could retain its independent operations. To help Harriton House receive funding, we worked on centralizing their data collection systems, generating headcount forms, and creating guides for staff for easy maintenance.
We primarily used Excel forms, OneDrive, and Excel sheets as our tools for data collection and storage. To gather information from roamers, we created an Excel form with a QR code containing questions about demographics and group sizes. The QR code provides a convenient and accessible way to collect headcounts digitally, requiring only a few taps on a phone.
One major issue Harriton House faced was finding an efficient way to house their volunteer check-in and check-out system. Prior to this project, the Harriton staff had been using paper copies to track volunteer hours, which was not ideal for students in the nearby area to demonstrate their volunteer participation for credits and fund proposals.
We decided to explore Microsoft Excel as the macros function was perfect for our goal of creating an easy, simple, and quick method for volunteers to track their hours. Microsoft Excel is also free on the App Store for volunteers to download and check in and out from their devices. Through trial and error and adapting from codes we found on YouTube channels such as Barb Henderson, we were able to generate a fully automated Excel sheet that can track what time volunteers clocked in and out, and the total hours they worked throughout the week. We implemented volunteer ID numbers as a way for volunteers to clock in and out swiftly. These volunteer ID numbers are unique 4-digit numbers that Harriton staff can assign based on the volunteer’s birthdate. Our hopes for this Excel sheet is for it to relieve the workload off of Harriton staff and have quantitative data on hand for fund proposals. But this spreadsheet only works for regular volunteers. For event-specific volunteers, we created another Excel form for volunteer logins during specific events. Volunteers must record their start and end times on this form.
This project helped cultivate community connections with the Harriton staff, taught the importance of patience, and allowed for the practice of data governance. This praxis, Data in Action, focuses on a variety of topics, one of them being data governance. How do we ensure that the data is being stored safely, not being taken advantage of, and can be reproduced? To implement data governance, we worked to ensure that users consented to their data being used, the information was reproducible, and not identifiable. We informed the people filling out our headcounting survey about why we were asking for this information and asked for their permission to use their information for head counting. Then, in order to ensure reproducibility, we created guidelines, specifically for the volunteer check-in and check-out information. We created instructions on how to clean the dataset and conduct analyses for staff, as well as instructions for the volunteers who were going to fill out the form. The third aspect was fulfilled by creating four-digit ID numbers to identify data rather than using the personal information of people who filled out the forms, preventing re-identifiability.
This project aimed to help digitize the Harriton House’s data and to make it easier for them to fulfill data aggregation to receive funding. We are excited to see the staff use our materials and are hopeful that the Harriton Association will, in due course, receive funding for them to continue operating independently.