Intro
In an attempt to learn more about what Carto has to offer users, I was interested in designing a map that would illustrate the dense population of museums in New York City using Carto as a design tool. There were two motives in my design, and since my target audience include New York City residents or people coming to the city with an intent to visit a museum or few like myself, I feel qualified to define these motives.
The first and primary purpose of the map would be to display the museums and allow the viewer to search through and find basic information on each of the museums such as address and a link to their website. The second goal was to simply show density. This gives the user the opportunity to see neighboring museums and plan day trips with multiple stops.
Inspiration
The original idea for this map came when I searched the Museum Council’s page (Figure 1) for their list of museums hoping for something easy to navigate quickly while planning an outing.
Figure 1 Museum Council Directory screenshot
Upon finding their directory, I found that navigating the site would require a lot more effort on my part, and I wished for a simpler way to plan my trips than clicking on names in a list and navigating each museum to find their address, visiting hours, and admission costs.
This brought me to my second visualization (Figure 2), a search engine and map. I personally prefer Bing because they at least pay me for the data I provide to them. This map was closer to what I was looking for and does provide more of the quick information that I wanted on museums such as hours and addresses without the need to visit each museum’s website. Searching for “museums” in New York City can be a little overwhelming and visually looks a little crowded. On top of that, not all of the locations listed where what I would have considered as a museum.
Figure 2 Bing maps search of “museums”
My next idea was that my visual should show density of museums. I discovered a choropleth map of New York City showing the density of licensed dogs by zip code (Figure 3) and thought this was a visually neat way of displaying density and help to alleviate some of the visual surplus that individual icons for each museum made.
Figure 3 Screenshot taken from the NYC Economic Development Corporation
Materials and datasets
The museum data for my map came from NYC Open Data as point data along with the shapefiles for NYC neighborhoods and boroughs. The background map as well as tool for generating the visualization came from Carto.
Methods
After creating an account, I uploaded KML files of point data for the museums and shapefiles for the neighborhoods and boroughs to Carto. After adding the layers to my map, I ordered them so that the museum points were on the top layer followed by the borough layer and finally neighborhoods on the bottom.
The purpose of the borough layer was just to give a reference for people who are more familiar with boroughs than individual neighborhoods. I made this layer transparent with dark outlines so that the borders were visible, but it didn’t cover or distract from the neighborhood and individual museum layers. This also allowed users to answer questions like, “How many museums are there in Queens?”
To make the neighborhood layer into a choropleth map, I first used the Analysis tool to intersect and aggregate the neighborhood layer, as the base, to the museum layer. Then, to make this formula visual, I used the Style tool to color the neighborhood layer by value. I did this as well with the borough layer to the museum layer, but I found that the two overlapping choropleth maps were too confusing and visually overwhelming, so I stuck with keeping the borough layer transparent.
Next, I added popups for each of the museum which included the name of the museum, address, website, and phone number for each museum. I updated the popups to show more human readable labels. I also added popups to each neighborhood and borough which included neighborhood name (for the neighborhood layer), borough name, and the number of museums in that neighborhood or borough. I moved the count to the top of the popups as this seemed like the first thing users would be interested in when clicking on neighborhoods or boroughs. I also made the popups appear by clicking instead of hover to make the map more mobile friendly and also because there are a lot of popups on this map and that would have been too much motion to make everything have a hover option.
I added a legend to the neighborhoods map which includes a density bar to show the level of museums and also the average number of museums by neighborhood. I then went to the Map Options section where I learned I could add a feature to the legend called Layer Selector that would allow the user to add or remove layers as they desired. This was exactly what I was hoping to find, as the icons from the museums would hide the choropleth but provided necessary information on each of the museums.
Results/discussion
The final museum map (Figure 4) is a tool that shows the most museum heavy neighborhoods and provides users with basic information to plan their day trips. I would have liked to have more information in the museum popups like admission costs and hours but could not find a dataset that included that information.
After exploring the map, I realized there were some issues with the dataset I had. For example, the neighborhood for Central Park, Ellis Island, and the Statue of Liberty are labeled “park-cemetary-etc-Manhattan” and I found matching neighborhoods for Queens and Brooklyn. There were also some cases where the neighborhood layer indicated that there were several museums in that space, but when the museum layer was added, no museums were shown. In the end, I deemed the map useful, but not entirely reliable.
Figure 4 Screenshot of finished map using Carto
Future direction
What would really improve this map is an accurate and complete dataset. I realized that all of my issues with the map could be solved with a better source of data. The issue is that there doesn’t appear to be a clear source for all the information that I want that is kept up to date.
References
Museum Map by Dani: https://dfrank13.carto.com/builder/7093b261-fcda-4907-99d9-d39b740d271d/embed
Dog Map: https://www.nycedc.com/sites/default/files/filemanager/Fig1_dog_population.jpg
Museum Council list: http://museumscouncil.org