The hacker community came to MediaCity for the Greater Manchester Big Data Dive on Tues 22nd July 2014. Coders, data monkeys and other techie enthusiasts gathered to respond to social challenges set for them.
Our project asked a big data team to paint an alternative data portrait of Ordsall (the Salford district where we are researching cultural activities). Policy direction and language about the area tend towards identifying problems and issues (see the Ordsall Ward Profile) rather than looking at the good and interesting activities going on. Our challenge at the event therefore asked participants to:
- Present an ‘objective’ portrait of statistics
- Characterise the area in a way that challenges stereotypes (about demography, built environment)
- Frame ‘absences’ (certain types of provision against national averages etc)
Here was my presentation for this event: bigdata_surf
The results
Our team came second! What a great result. We should have come first really 😉 The data helped us:
We challenged perceptions of crime in Ordsall by creating a map of hotspots across the city region (see below).
Hotspots in Burglaries data for Manchester city region, 2000-2014. Note how parts of Manchester are white hot with crime while Ordsall is darker with only a few pale patches.
Hotspots in Violent Crime data for Manchester city region, 2000-2014. Again, note how parts of Manchester are white hot with crime while Ordsall is darker with only a few pale patches.
Car accidents near Ordsall Park area, 2000-2014. Note how residents within ‘the triangle’ are trapped on all sides by dangerous roads.
Hotspots of car accidents in Ordsall area, 2002-2013. Note how Chapel St is red with accidents.
Hotspots of car accidents in Ordsall area, 2011-2013 (after traffic calming measures). Note the difference between Chapel St before and after traffic calming.
Tracking positive and negative tweets about Ordsall in Twitter, 2014. Note that 60% of tweets are positive. The negative ones were complaining about litter and graffiti.
Thanks to the Team5 for making it happen. We met for the first time that day and yet worked together really well. 🙂 While we all walked away with Amazon vouchers for coming 2nd, the real prize was learning about what was possible to do with data.
If just one day with open data helped us learn a lot about the area, what would regular and unrestricted access to the data and a talented techie team help us do?
A team has indeed picked up the challenge and interesting issues are emerging. The geographical co-ordinates for data collection vary across different data sets and this is proving the most challenging part – whether to search by postcode or lat/long or XY co-ordinates. Layering data from different places is made much more challenging due to a lack of standardisation of geodata. A solution has just emerged to draw a rectangle or polygon on Google Maps and convert postcode data to lat/longs and go from there… Meanwhile, a twitter tool may help paint a tweeting picture of the area also defined by lat/long. An ancient navigation mechanism invented for sailing is still useful today…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude