Introduction
The goal of this project was to be able to better understand the makeup of New York City’s Garment District, find unique tenants and discover interconnection between the organizations’ roles, jobs and locations.
Inspiring Visualizations
For my inspiration, I looked to visual networks that grouped relationships in a circular fashion to one another. Below the visualization connected musical artists to one another. This is potentially inspiration for next steps in this design when looking to focus in on one particular company and how it connects out to its suppliers, or who it supplies to directly.
Materials
- Dataset: The dataset utilized to create this visualization: GDA Tenant Directory 2018
2. Software
- Google Sheets & Excel: Using these spreadsheet programs I added in an additional field to categorize each company by its primary purpose or type of service they provide to their customers. This is so when visualized, it is possible to see who makes up the majority of the Garment District, as well as highlight unique or specialty companies that hold an unusual role.
- Gephi: Using this program I connected the companies to their address in the Garment District and sorted them by their type.
- Photoshop: To create labels for each grouping of companies I utilized Photoshop to display the title of the type.
Methods
- Data Clean-Up and Organization: In order to determine which companies were at the same address, I used the delimiter to create a new address field that did not include Floor or suite # so that when displayed if companies shared the same address they would be connected at that exact location.
- Labeling Companies based on description: Going through keywords in the description helped define each company’s role quickly and create general categories.
- Using The Circle Pack Layout add-on in Gephi I grouped the companies by type.
The sizing of the address nodes was based on how many companies were located inside that particular building. This was done to highlight primary locations, as well as look at the diversity of company types within a location. Out of the 2,000+ Companies in the Garment District, there were 223 unique addresses in the Tenant Directory.
Results
Designers were the top tenants of the Garment District followed by manufacturers, general apparel sales, patternmakers, and trimming/embellishments. This mapping also helped better display how closely connected the district is in terms of locations, even if the companies serve in different capacities.
Reflections
Moving forward with this project the goal is to find connections between each company within the district. For example, connecting the designers to their suppliers will help better understand how the district functions together to produce for the Fashion Industry.