{"id":23430,"date":"2021-04-21T23:11:52","date_gmt":"2021-04-22T03:11:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/?p=23430"},"modified":"2021-05-09T12:55:20","modified_gmt":"2021-05-09T16:55:20","slug":"go-off-fireworks-over-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/visualization\/go-off-fireworks-over-new-york\/","title":{"rendered":"Go Off! Fireworks Over New York"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The summer of 2020 is not one we\u2019ll soon forget. For folks here in New York City and other major cities across the United States, it was the summer of Covid-19 lockdowns, the summer of protests and racial unrest, and the summer of… fireworks<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More so than anyone could remember in recent history, amateur firework shows plagued this city<\/a> and others. New Yorkers reported<\/a> hearing the sounds of fireworks around the clock, from well before dusk until the wee hours of the morning. Trapped in their homes under a deluge of pops, whistles, and booms, citizens took to social media to complain, bringing the issue to national news attention and even spawning a psy-op conspiracy theory<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This week, I\u2019m creating a geospatial visualization of that summer with Carto<\/a>. I\u2019m using 311 data from NYC Open Data<\/a> to map the explosion of fireworks complaints across the city from May through August 2020. I began by exporting a subset of NYC\u2019s 311 Service Requests per my desired parameters and importing it into Carto. Over 48,000 service requests related to illegal fireworks were initiated during this 123-day period!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

My initial point map was very dense, so I considered my options for aggregation. I had experience using hexbins or heatmaps to show cumulative data, but the animation option caught my eye. It seemed to me that using animation, I could create a visualization that could replay the summer, day by day.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I configured the animation settings to my liking, sometimes with a goal in mind (referencing the \u201ccreated date\u201d column so that my data will be presented chronologically), and sometimes using trial and error (changing point size and resolution for clarity, tweaking the number of frames and clip duration).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

By this point, I had created a striking animation that resembled fireworks. I decided to lean into this effect and switch to a basemap with a darker color scheme for emphasis. For the final step, I had to design my legend. The default options were not appropriate for my animation, so I improvised, keeping one legend entry and labeling it \u201cEach dot represents a complaint to 311.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Below is the final product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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