Introduction
Launched as an initiative of the Pratt Center for Community Development, Made in NYC works to support a vibrant manufacturing community within the five boroughs of New York City. Made in NYC offers their member companies workshops ranging from photography shoots to marketing and promotional lessons from expert fellows from a variety of backgrounds. The member companies of Made in NYC come from many different sectors, with the predominant industries focusing their manufacturing on fashion, food & beverage, and/or home & interiors. This dashboard of visualizations, accessed publically in interactive form at http://bit.ly/MINYC demonstrates the distribution of Made in NYC’s member companies throughout New York City, and allows visitors to query by sector/industry.
Materials
I was inspired by the NYC Hazard Mitigation Projects map released by the Mayor’s Office for Recovery and Resiliency as part of One NYC. The comprehensive and interactive map allows New Yorkers to search within the toolbar by mitigation action type, the scheduled phase, as well as the kind of project they are looking for.
These various map layers make it easy for visitors to the site to learn about various issues of climate resiliency and what the city is working to accomplish across areas of emergency management, infrastructural improvement projects, as well as public education and awareness building.
Methods
As a project assistant for Made in NYC I have access to our organization’s dashboard of member companies, and pulled this data from our website’s backend. Once it was downloaded as a CSV file, I cleaned it up and removed additional data that was less pertinent to what I aimed to visualize, and then geocoded addresses to create lat/long coordinates for each business using Google Sheets. Initially importing this data into Carto, I realized (with the help of Professor Sula) that this data would be best demonstrated with Tableau.
With each business mapped out by their given address, the geocoded lat/long coordinates, and with the borough column allowing visualizations denoted by borough boundary, I was able to plot each Made in NYC member company as a point on the map and then color these points by industry.
Results
As a project assistant of Made in NYC, I was not surprised by the distribution of our member companies, either across industry or geographical location, as it is something that I am familiar with from my work. However, I think there are very telling patterns through this map, such as the high prevalence of fashion businesses in midtown Manhattan and in northern Brooklyn, and the larger amount of food & beverage and home &interior businesses throughout Brooklyn and Queens. It also is very clear to Made in NYC that we need more representation in the Bronx and Staten Island, and we are working hard to support manufacturing in these boroughs too.
Future Directions
In future studies, I hope to work with the company that handles web development for the Made in NYC Initiative to connect the Google Sheet I populated this data with live data from our website’s backend. If I am able to connect our backend, with new companies being added nearly daily, with a live Google Sheet that populates this graphic, it will be regularly updated and reflect the organization’s current composition of member companies. I am very impressed with Tableau Public as a data visualization tool and look forward to using it more in my work.