The most excellent Tumblr of the Sunlight Foundation
The Sandy effect: how Manhattan looks on Foursquare after a hurricane
Popular check-in app Foursquare offers great data, showing the places people visit at any given time of day. The data tells a compelling story, especially for events like Hurricane Sandy.
Take a look at a visualization of check-ins in Manhattan on the Saturday prior to the storm and on Wednesday Oct. 31, days after Sandy hit. This really drives home how Sandy created two towns within Manhattan.
wnyc:
WNYC’s Resources:
Occupying Wall Street: Places and Spaces of Political Action
For nine weeks last fall crowds gathered every evening at the eastern end of Zuccotti Park, where a shallow crescent of stairs creates a modest amphitheater, to form the New York City General Assembly. A facilitator reviewed rules for prioritizing speakers and gestures by which participants could signal agreement or dissent. Over two hours or more, they worked through issues of common concern — every word repeated by the assembly, which formed a human microphone amplifying the speaker’s voice — until they reached consensus.
Odd Things Happen When You Chop Up Cities And Stack Them Sideways
Take away the bums, the fashionistas, the food carts, the cabs, the colors, the smells, the sounds, cut it up and stack it on a table, New York’s grid system seems more than a little monotonous.
One World Trade Center visualised
What kind of building will become America’s tallest? On the 11th anniversary of 9/11, Online Architectural Degree has created this guide to the third tallest in the world
Filming OpenGov Champions: Liz Barry
As Sunlight’s Video production Director it is my delight to be producing an ongoing video series called OpenGov Champions, featuring citizens who take action in their own ways to open up, or as in this case, contribute to, government data.
I was especially excited to go to Brooklyn, NY to film this episode in which we showcase Liz Barry from Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) and their grassroots mapping efforts. Theirs is a unique way to work with and contribute to open government data. I had watched Liz’s TED talk about the mapping they did in 2010 of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf Coast. Their maps were the only high resolution images available at the onset of the spill and spread all over the world media because access to airspace was restricted and planes could not capture aerial photos using traditional methods. It all had started with Jeffrey Warren in MIT and others who were experimenting with new ways to create high resolution maps using low cost, DIY technology like kites, balloons and cheap digital cameras. When the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, they saw the opportunity to help by mapping the scope of the disaster. That’s when Liz met them and jumped right in, helping with logistics and connecting people with boats and crews. In my mind there is a rock star quality to this kind of opengov data work. And they have indeed gotten a lot of fame for their work and were a Knight News Challenge winner in 2011 among other things.
2011 DOT Scorecard: More Jobs, More Subway Riders, Traffic Stays Flat
While the number of employed New Yorkers has recovered from the lows of the recession, motor vehicle traffic in the city remained flat last year, with increased demand for travel being met by the city’s increasingly stretched subways, according to NYC DOT’s annual Sustainable Streets Index update.
The report, released Monday, collects data from a wide variety of sources to assess the state of the city’s transportation network. The update is part of the city’s PlaNYC 2030 sustainability initiative and builds on previous releases from 2008, 2009 and 2010.
DOT’s preliminary data shows that citywide motor vehicle traffic, measured by counting “daily weekday traffic volumes at Borough and City boundaries,” flattened out in 2011 after rising 1.1 percent in 2010. Even with 2010’s increase, in 2011 traffic remained 0.8 percent below pre-recession 2007 levels. Meanwhile, weekday subway ridership is up 2.5 percent in 2011 over 2010.
The evolution of NYC’s skyline, 1876-2013. Also see the evolution of NYC’s famous street grid.
New model of disease contagion ranks U.S. airports in terms of their spreading influence
Airports in New York, Los Angeles and Honolulu are judged likeliest to play a significant role in the growth of a pandemic.
And this is what NYC’s internet infrastructure looks like on a map
Where do students go versus people with senior/disabled passes? Where do 7-day pass users go versus 30-day pass users? We took a look to see what we would find. This is for from March 17-23, 2012.
The 1940 U.S. Census records were recently released by the National Archives. With a little work you can find any street (that existed in 1940) and see the census forms. They tell you the names, ages, occupations, salaries and state or country of birth for all residents. I was able to locate my mother and her family in South Philly. My father grew up in the Bronx and though I couldn’t find him (his parents briefly lived in New Rochelle, NY), I was able to track down other members of the family at the apartment we used to visit in my youth.
City Seeks Lilliputian Living Units
New Yorkers routinely grouse about living in apartments roughly the size of a closet. Under a city contest announced Monday, that complaint might not be such an exaggeration.
A new competition launched by Mayor Michael Bloomberg calls for plans to develop dozens of so-called micro-units, studio apartments that go beyond cozy to downright compact: 275 to 300 square feet.
Data Graphic Shows What New Yorkers Complain About
311 is New York City’s main source of government information and non-emergency services. The service, launched in 2003, currently receives some 50,000 calls a day and offers information about more than 3,600 topics — school closings, recycling rules, homeless shelters, park events, pothole repairs, you name it. Each complaint is logged, tagged and mapped, allowing for further analysis. Pitch Interactive came up with this interesting data visualization that provides insight in common complaints by time of the day. The graphic shows 34,522 complaints that were collected between 8 September and 15 September, 2010.
