Conviz

Overview

Conviz is a Rails web app that allows web based access and visualisation of the British Convict Transportation Registry.
This project was started at Hack at the Mitchell and was developed as an entry for {Library:/hack/}.

Features

Convict Information

One of the basic functions of Conviz is it makes the registry information available online in a user friendly format via the following features:

View the complete registry as paginated tables; this feature also includes the ability to sort by any field e.g. date of departure or destination.
Search for convicts by name (first, last or both)
View all available information about a convict
Conviz has derived some additional information about each convict (e.g. county of conviction), this is displayed along side the convict's records
Data cleansing (merging similar but slightly different fields), e.g. Boat names and destinations.

Convict Filter

The registry contains a lot of entries (+123,000), Conviz allows the registry to be filtered into smaller subsets of related convicts.

Convicts can be filtered by:

Boat
Destination
Departure year
Conviction county
Sentence
First or last name

Visualisations

Visualisations (graphs, charts & maps) where the main reason for building Conviz and the site currently includes the following visualisations:

Bar chart of boats that transported the most convicts
Bubble chart of the top 100 boats
Geo intensity map of convict destinations
Donut graph of convict destinations and destination states
Stacked area graph of conviction year and destination state
Column chart of departure month
Pie chart of departure decade
Bar chart of top conviction counties
Google map with pins for all conviction counties
Pie chart of sentence severities
Column chart of conviction decade and sentence severity
Bar chart of most popular first names
Bar chart of most popular last names
Map of Conviction County and Destination on individual convict pages

Code Quality

The quality of code on this project is particularly low, there are no tests, tons of inline Javascript and various other hacks. This project was completed in a fairly short amount of time that required a bit of corner cutting.

Dev

Download the convict transport registry from: http://data.gov.au/dataset/british-convict-transportation-registers/ and put it in the lib folder.

Then run:

rake db:migrate
rake seed:counties
rake seed:destinations
rake insert_convicts

You should then be able to start the rails server and view all the convict records.

Notes

Ideas

Pending

Convict photos
Add an indicator about fleet number e.g. leaving 1787 is first fleet
Link boats to wikipedia
Provide links to famous convicts
Make the top boats graph a stacked bar graph showing how many convicts per each voyage

TODO

Add Irish Records : http://www.nationalarchives.ie/search/index.php?varmatchnames%5B0%5D=record_last_name&varmatchoperators%5B0%5D=isnotnull&varmatchvalues%5B0%5D=&scopeincludes%5B%5D=147&category=18&advanced=true&advancedSearchSbm=Submit#searchfocus
Create a page for every boat
Create a page for every county
Add a graph indicating how early / late a convict was added
Add gauge of term to show convict page
Add no flash message
See if Modernisr ect can be removed
Download all records as CSV
Fix terms table sort

Database Restore: pg_restore -v -c -O -d conviz_production conviz.db.bk

o-sam-o/conviz