Hello! It’s the Westside Communities Alliance Data Dashboard team again.
Since we last talked, we have
- added in a few new visualizations for the aggregate page and made some tweaks based on our partner’s and mentor’s feedback;
- continued developing the heatmap;
- attended and spoke at Vine City’s Public Safety Committee meeting;
- presented at the Midterm Presentations; and
- began thinking about adding in some analysis component to the tool.
So let’s debrief one at a time!
For the aggregate page, we’ve added a few more visualizations and made some changes, but mostly to show different comparisons between NPUs and Westside/Atlanta as a whole. As an example, we made the following chart, which shows the difference between the total number of crime reports from each NPU and the median number of crime reports for the NPUs. So here, the vertical dotted line set at 0 is the median, and the bars show how far that NPU deviates from the median. For example, NPU M has a significantly higher number of crime reports than the median, and NPU Q has a lower number than the median. This was to somewhat account for the population density. As another version of this, we have a chart with the % contribution instead of a pure count shown in this chart, but it shows essentially the same visualization.
In regards to the heatmap, we’ve narrowed down our style and chose to go forward with the hex map. You can filter the type of crime you’d like to see with a dropdown menu and choose to view other things such as vacant housing or assets (schools, religious institutions, community assets). We are currently toying with various types of ways to choose the time frame. Our basemap changed to this one to help the users orient themselves better as that one was one of the feedback from the partners.
We used this poster for both the Public Safety Committee meeting as well as the Midterm Presentations. At the Public Safety meeting, people seemed excited about this project, and there was a code enforcement officer who was particularly interested due to the code violations component of the project. We are currently in communications with him and on track to meet with him this week!
From just observing the meeting, it seemed that there was a lot of concerns over illegal parking on vacant lots especially during the football season (as Vine City is right next to the stadium), so our map of the vacant lots may be very useful for the community. Furthermore, they were discussing the kick-off of the “sector concept,” which was essentially a structured neighborhood watch system with sector leaders and block leaders in charge of their respective areas. We mentioned that these locations could be plotted as community assets, and they were very excited to see what reports they could pull from this.
Speaking of reports, during our Midterm Presentation, a feedback we received was that we lacked an analysis component, which may be very useful for the community, so we are currently thinking of and researching different ways to incorporate this into our tool.
So our next steps are
- to continue to refine the visualizations, especially the heat map
- to toy with some sort of analysis component
- to discuss with the community and our partners to see what else they would like to see (we hope to visit the Westside computer lab to talk to the residents).
Onwards and upwards!