me:
Eric Brelsford
@ebrelsford
me:
freelance programmer, mapmaker, teacher
we tend to talk more about tools than we do about data
or when we do talk about data, it's the medium to large data sources
so why doesn't all data exist?
historic data that hasn't been digitized
source
data that simply hasn't been collected
data that is not politically convenient to release
"...there is no injunction on the state to map its roads anymore than there is for it to map the locations of deaths attributable to motor vehicles, or the density of cancer-linked emissions from internal combustion engines, or the extent of noise pollution associated with automotive traffic..."
image source
"It would be gratifying to live in a state that produced 1.75 million copies of such maps and distributed them free of cost...but states find it more expedient to publish maps of highways."
—Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps
image source
once you hit the limits of existing data, collecting your own becomes a project of its own
surveying on foot
georeferencing old maps
transcribing and aggregating data
"out of the 17,000 law-enforcement agencies in the United States, only 750, or 4.4% of them, submitted death-by-police data to the FBI in the most recent year available."
source
scraping
"...the origins of the project, scraping and visualisation architectures, on Data Journalism vs Data Activism vs Open Source, and how to disrupt the marketing of a $25Bn company without getting sued."
source
add qualitative research
Urban Reviewer
call Parks and say "where's our park?"
What is urban renewal?
Urban
Renewal
let's map them!
we weren't the first to have this idea
Community Development Program Progress Report (1968)
Atlas of Urban Renewal (1984)
FOIL
FOILed!
thank you, awesome volunteers!