Connecticut State Health Assessments (SHA) are wonderful tools for presenting a snapshot of the champions, challenges and overall health of the state. The process of putting together a SHA is also a gargantuan undertaking. Building the document itself is equally large and the process is likely a manual slog. I say likely, because I don't know how it was built.
- Wouldn't it be great to have some insight into how it was built?
- Wouldn't it be great if the process of putting the document together and deploying to a website and multiple formats was as easy as one command?
- Wouldn't be great if the publication wasn't only an enormous pdf, but a webpage with useful interactions, like a search bar and pop-ups on hover?
- Wouldn't it be great if this was developed out in the open, with open data?
- Wouldn't it be great if there was infrastructure in place to reproduce a version of the SHA that could be run every year?
I would love to ship the ideal I was hinting at above. I'm not entirely sure it could ever happen, but I'd like to think so. So I'm going to mock up a concept using random open data from the CT Open Data Portal and snippets from the previous SHA and showcase what the SHA can be!
The SHA is always going to be a larger undertaking, and I am not out to besmirch previous efforts. I think they are wonderful documents, however, I think the build and deploy process like has some rough edges that could be smoothed away without using tax dollars. I also believe by making it more open and transparent for the public it becomes a much better, more user-friendly product and it will literally be easier to recreate for CT DPH staff and contributors.
This will be built with the following core tools:
- R v4.4.2 (see
renv.lockfor packages) - RStudio 2024.12.0 Build 467
- Quarto v1.6.39
- git
- github
- zotero
I also want to highlight some other tools that aren't core to this project, but I use them and enjoy using them and I want to highlight them: