As NYCgo mentions on its website: “Today humans can’t seem to function without constant access to the Internet; there’s just so much googling, Yelping, tweeting, Facebooking and Instagramming to do.”, Wifi hotspot is becoming the infrastructure of a city. People not only want it in the coffeehouse, but also want it in the park, on the bus and even underground (subway).
To understand how NYC is handling the needs, I found a dataset of “NYC Wi-Fi Hotspots Locations” from NYC OpenData, and used Tableau Public to visualize the information. I want to find the answers to below questions:
- How are the hotspots distributed in the 5 boroughs?
- Which area has the most hotspots?
- When are the hotspots installed?
- What are the types of hotspots?
Before creating my own visualizations, I gathered some visualization examples for design inspirations. The first one is the original visualization on the NYC OpenData which displays each location of the hotspots on the map; when you click each dot, the details of the hotspots will show up. The second one is a map example I found when I researched how to create maps with Tableau Public, which is a student work from our school. The last one is an example of packed bubbles, which is a great way to see some values in relation to another.
Design Examples
Mapping the NYC Wi-Fi Hotspot Locations
Following the examples and questions, the first type of visualization I created is Map. At first, I used the data of “longitude” and “latitude” to map each location, and then add other details (e.g. year of activated, borough name, location, etc.) to the marks so the users can click and know more about the hotspot. I further used different colors to differentiate the years of activated, so users can easily identify when are the hotspots are activated. Unfortunately, due to some time data are missing in the dataset, there is a portion of the hotspots cannot be marked with the actual year.
I also created another map based on the “postcode” and marked the number of hotspots in each area. To make it easier to compare, I added different shades of a color to show the number of hotspots. The visualization shows the Brooklyn Heights and Dumbo neighborhood (postcode: 11201) has 159 hotspots which are the most in the NYC, followed by the neighborhood around Columbia University with 92 hotspots (postcode: 10027), while some areas only have one hotspot.
When Are They Activated
Although I mapped the location and year of activated in the first map, it is still difficult to compare the number of hotspots in each borough and which year activated the most hotspots.
Therefore, I created histogram and line chart to visualize the data, which work very well for the comparison. From the chart, we can see Manhattan has the most hotspots, more than twice to Brooklyn. Staten Island has the least hotspots. Based on the existing valid data, NYC activated the most hotspots in 2017. By combining the data of borough and activated time, I found Manhattan activated the most hotspots in 2016 and the number is decreasing since then. On the contrary, the number is increasing from 2016 to 2017 in other boroughs. It means the need for hotspots is fulfilled in Manhattan earliest.
Type of Wi-Fi
I also took a look at the types of the Wifi, including whether they are totally free, the providers and where they are placed. The result shows 80.66% of the Wifi hotspots are free, while there are around 20% of them are limited free, such as only free for three hours.
LinkNYC is the largest providers, having 1,578 hotspots, followed by Spectrum (343), Transit Wireless (276), AlticeUSA (237) and Harlem (128). Regarding the location, most of them are provided from the outdoor kiosk. Library is also a place where provides many hotspots.
Future Directions
Tableau Public is a powerful tool to create visualization and there are many other functions can be explored. In the future, there are many directions I would like to spend more time on.
First, I want to try combining different types of data in one visualization. It helps to discover new insights, such as the third visualization above which combines the borough and activated time. When I was conducting research about using Tableau Public, I found there are ways we can create a map with multiple layers. For example, adding pie charts to different areas of the map, which also provides more insights for readers.
Second, I would like to spend more time on building dashboard and provide more flexibility for users to interact with the visualization, such as enabling them to filter the data they want or use one visualization to filter another one.
“NYC Wifi hotspots locations” is just one of the many interesting topics for visualization. In the future, I would also try to find more valuable dataset, visualize the information, and tell a story with it.
References:
- Stephen Few, Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis (Analytics
Press 2009) [ISBN 0970601980] - https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Social-Services/NYC-Wi-Fi-Hotspot-Locations/a9we-mtpn/data (Dataset and first design example)
- http://studentwork.prattinfoschool.nyc/blog/coursework/information-visualization/lab4-mapping-nyc-311-complaint-data/attachment/tableau-map-2/ (Second design example)
- http://bonnyai.hu/ (Third design example)