Rats?

While there's many cool and fancy ways to parse 311 data, I wanted to go for something concise that would generate feedback for the city improvement. Here's how this mini-interactive came together over the course of a Sunday evening and Monday morning. Feel free to poke around under the hood as well

Interviewing the Data

Whenever I get 311 data, my question is always what are people complaining about the most? But before I dove into that, I wanted to see how others had tried to answer this question. After Googled around, I saw several attractive visualizations, however none of them were insightful.

Most visualisations just bombarded me with overall stats, and the latter was basically a fiery hexbin map of population density. It was time for me to choose whether I would be a generalist or a specialist. I chose the latter, hoping for one good story. My time at the Texas Tribune taught me that maps and visualizations that offered a hodge-podge of stats don't do as well as ones that stick to one aspect of the data.

Boston.com had already published a listicle that gave me a sense of the most 311 calls. Nevertheless, I learned to always check it against a few clustering algorithms after dealing with messy oil well inspection data.

Open Refine

Mostly I use Refine for its clustering algorithms or Google Refine Expression Language for string operations.

In doing so, I quickly discovered that Boston.com's list did not go to the lengths I was going. In 2012 there were 8133 pothole-related complaints, bringing it to the second most largest 311 complaint.

The reason? City Workers can file an internal complaint to better tag problematic road conditions. Nevertheless that's still a lot of potholes.

So I used the Google's Expression Language, aka GREL, to clean up the latitudes and longitudes and map out these potholes. While the data was loading, I took the opportunity to read up about Boston's road conditions.

Turns out, this is a well known problem for the city, and the fact that city workers could file internal complaints didn't quite answer my question of what people are complaining about in general. So I decided to couch potholes once I saw that most of them occured on main roads and go for rodent activity instead.

DRYing out the Project

One of the biggest things I learned while working with NPR's News Apps team is to that you want to keep your project DRY and modular. This allows for greater re-use in the future. So I decided to use their template for a couple of reasons: LESS, file compression, and a local server that watched for static file changes.

To my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has begun to conform NPR's app-template into a real, reusable template for another newsroom. While most of the local development side is running in Python, the rest is all JS and LESS.

UI/UX

For a while I debated creating a map with draggable markers, but I chose not to though because of the editorial implications.

This wouldn't have be too difficult since I spent most of the summer working on a similar UX. However, I had my reservations with this kind of topic. What's stopping someone from adding inappropriate content, similar to some of the markers on WNYC's Watering Holes map?

A simple Disqus thread with copy emphasizing adding a photo was more manageable. It would also create a vertical narrative with the all comments and replies.

I used the remaining time to get the map design and UI succinct. A well designed map can easily go viral, and considering the topic I had a sense that this would definitely be a conversation starter.

I made sure to create readable labels which position themseleves appropriately at different zoom levels.

Refactor, Re-Use, Reflect

Considering the fact that the city is testing out new ways to combat potholes and that Boston.com already has a pothole map, my 2.0 would be to create a map template for the Globe that lets readers add, edit and remove markers for any number of subjects. (The idea would be to take the features of Gabriel's Boston Marathon Bombing map and make them more responsive and usable for other probjects.)