Heart of the Valley

Our Valley of Heart's Delight (Santa Clara Valley, or the South Bay Area) has so many incredible murals and public art. This open source project visualizes and maps data about local public art and murals. We hope that this will help community members discover the beautiful murals and public art that make our communities vibrant. We also hope the map can help community members discover local artists and creatives in the South Bay.

This is an open source project.

It is maintained by Code for San José volunteers.

Questions about forking or using this project? Read our license.

Technologies:

Mapbox GL JS
Open Street Maps
JavaScript
Bootstrap
HTML
CSS

How to contribute

Want to contribute data about local public art/murals? Submit the data as an issue, or in our contact form

Contribute your research, development or design skills. Check out our list of issues on GitHub, and join our discussion on Slack: #public-art channel.

Development

This project uses Node.js and works with the latest Node.js LTS version 10.15.3. If you don't already have a preferred Node.JS IDE, it is recommended to use Visual Studio Code with this project.

Project setup:

Fork, then clone the project and run npm install to install the required packages listed in package.json.

Updating the scraped data:

The following steps are involved in updating the artwork data:

Scrape the Artwork files from sanjoseca.gov - Run npm run scrapeArtworks. This will fetch data from sanjoseca.gov and populate the artwork-data/_scraped-artworks.json file with the fetched data. A unique ID is assigned to each artwork.
Merge the scraped artwork data with the artwork overrides - Run npm run mergeArtworkFiles. Some artwork files have incorrect addresses or addresses which cannot be looked up with Nomanatim. The artwork-data/artworks-overrides.json file exists as a way to reliably fix the data associated with the artwork so that Nominatim can find the location.
Check for untitled art (optional) - Run npm run listUntitled. Some art is reported as "untitled" for the "title" field. If you know the title of the art, then add an override for it in the artworks-overrides.json and re-run step 2.
Lookup addresses with OSM/Nominatim - Run npm run lookupAddresses. This will use the artwork address field to attempt to get the geolocation (latitude and longitude). The output of this command will indicate if there are failures to lookup the address. If you know the location, then add an override for it in the artworks-overrides.json and re-run step 2, then re-run step 4.
Copy the artwork JSON data into art.js - Finally, copy the contents of artwork-data/consolidated-artworks.json into js/art.js, prefixing the content with const art = . (TODO: write a script to automate this step)

Running the project locally

This project is completely static, so simply open index.html in Chrome or Firefox.

You can also run the project in a local web server on the project directory. One way to do this is to use the ws command, which can be installed using npm install -g local-web-server, then start the webserver by running ws --http2 in the project folder and going to https://127.0.0.1:8000 in your web browser. See the documentation for this program for more information.