Data News

With today’s release of NYC high school graduation data,...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:24:28 -0400

With today’s release of NYC high school graduation data, we decided to graph the graduation rates for every school in the city, for 8 years, on one chart. Check out the interactive version here.

WNYC has great coverage on how FEMA has scaled back the...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:02:16 -0400

WNYC has great coverage on how FEMA has scaled back the high-wave zones from their proposed 100-year flood zones. And we’ve mapped the data with a before-after slider to make the comparison. Click through for the interactive map.

Today we took a page out of the mayor’s plan for...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 21:19:31 -0400

Today we took a page out of the mayor’s plan for protecting the NYC coastlines (this page, to be precise) and turned around a version we think is easier to use. It goes with the WNYC story about the proposal, which includes lots of detail.

WNYC's Automatic Hurricane Tracker

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 23:45:00 -0400

As Hurricane Sandy approached, we worked hard to keep our community informed. Now we’re using what we learned to help other communities track an approaching storm.

Starting this evening, with Tropical Storm Andrea, WNYC has launched a redesigned Hurricane Tracker to automatically follow every tropical cyclone in the Atlantic basin.

Click through to the live tracker.

This map is embeddable, free and dynamically updates with the latest data from the National Hurricane Center.

You can view the map directly with this short link:

http://wny.cc/hurricane

Or embed the automatic tracker into your website or blog by cutting and pasting this html code:

<iframe frameborder="0" scrolling ="no" src="http://project.wnyc.org/news-maps/hurricane-tracker/index.html" width="100%" height="760" ></iframe>

The map adjusts to any column and works on mobile, too.

Louise Ma crafted the great, new design, and Steve Melendez wrote the code to render the map and make it follow the storm.

Email us at jkeefe@wnyc.org if you spot any issues or have feedback. We want to be sure it’s helpful and clear.

— John Keefe

Plans for protecting New York City from hurricanes date back to...

Wed, 29 May 2013 10:31:18 -0400

Plans for protecting New York City from hurricanes date back to the 1960s, after Hurricane Donna struck. Explore drawings for levees, dykes and sea walls for Staten Island and the Rockaways. And read the WNYC story.

WNYC and ClearHealthCosts.com want your help to track the cost...

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:40:55 -0400

WNYC and ClearHealthCosts.com want your help to track the cost of health care — specifically, the price of a routine mammogram. Read more about it or click through to share the price of your mammogram.

wnyc: Look at the cost disparity just for a one-month supply of...

Fri, 03 May 2013 14:47:28 -0400

wnyc:

Look at the cost disparity just for a one-month supply of the birth control pill TRI-SPRINTEC-28. The Brian Lehrer Show and Clear Health Costs mapped a whole bunch of brands. Check it out, and find out about the next project — finding the true cost of mammograms.

-Jody, BL Show-

Today we quickly charted the announcement of subway stations...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:06:00 -0400

Today we quickly charted the announcement of subway stations equipped with wi-fi and cell service using a beautiful, faded-map design by Louise Ma and repurposing the technology Steve Melendez put together for our “Changing Trains” post-Sandy subway recovery map. Click through for today’s story and zoomable map.

Summertime Gig with Data News

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:54:00 -0400

We’ve got the perfect summer-break job for someone who digs data, has a nose for news and works fast.

It’s six weeks on WNYC’s Data News Team. Join us and you will:

Help WNYC cover breaking news, like our Hurricane Sandy work
Help reporters find and mine data for major stories
Help make maps, charts and web apps
Help brainstorm and build feature projects, like the Dogs of New York
Help the journalism we do in New York and New Jersey
Have a fun time with a fun team

Our ideal helper loves the challenge of finding information and data, and enjoys working with it once it’s in our hands. They’re creative, inquisitive and unafraid of new technologies.

The gig runs from mid-May through June, and pays $3,000 for the period. It’s geared for college students, especially those in a journalism program with data skillz or those in a computer science program with interests or experience in journalism.

~~It’s a limited-time offer, so act now! Apply with this quick form.~~

UPDATE: Applications are closed … sorry!

photo by Alex Howard / @digiphile

The deadliest neighborhood the night Sandy hit is in a...

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:34:00 -0500

The deadliest neighborhood the night Sandy hit is in a topographical “bowl” where the elevation is less than 4 feet. Click through for WNYC’s interactive map and the full story.

How Single & How Happy Are You? WNYC invites you to put...

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 15:17:00 -0500

How Single & How Happy Are You? WNYC invites you to put yourself on our relationship grid. Click through for the live interactive.

The WNYC Data News Team invited people to stick a ruler in the...

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 16:42:00 -0500

The WNYC Data News Team invited people to stick a ruler in the snow, take a picture, and send it in. Then we put ‘em on a map. Click through to the live map.

We put a 1891 map over a current image of Jamaica Bay in NYC to...

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 21:33:00 -0500

We put a 1891 map over a current image of Jamaica Bay in NYC to let folks explore how the coastline has changed in a century. (Click through for the interactive version.)

WNYC’s Data News Team mined the city’s dog license...

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 08:14:00 -0500

WNYC’s Data News Team mined the city’s dog license database to map, list and make a game out of the Dogs of NYC.

Check out this beautiful remix of our flood maps by Sha Hwang....

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 10:47:00 -0500

Check out this beautiful remix of our flood maps by Sha Hwang.

A couple of us got to see Sha present at the Visualized conference, and I was really moved by his sense of design and the world around him. So I was honored when he asked if he could use our map tiles for this experiment. I think it’s a nice improvement on our interface.

Click through to his interactive version.

— John Keefe

Mapping the Floods

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 23:39:00 -0500

Check out where the floodwaters went, and how that corresponds with the predicted storm-surge zones along the entire New York and New Jersey Coastlines:

The flood data comes from these hugemongous shape files, which actually took 10 hours for my MacBook to render into tiles and upload to Mapbox.

For mapping folks who know their way around PostGIS, I used ST_Dump to break up the the huge shapes into thousands of smaller ones — a trick I learned from Andrew Hill. I think that helped it from taking even longer.

We have one more revision up our sleeve on this, which I hope to have up by later this week.

— John Keefe

Quick shout out to our @datanews folks and the entire @WNYC...

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 11:02:00 -0500

Quick shout out to our @datanews folks and the entire @WNYC digital team for our fantastic election-night map and coverage, particularly to Data News interaction designer Louise Ma who pulled together so much information into such a beautiful page. More posts on the plumbing behind the maps coming soon.

Since Sandy left town, we’ve been downloading MTA...

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 13:05:00 -0500

Since Sandy left town, we’ve been downloading MTA subway-recovery maps to feed WNYC’s Changing Trains map. Our Steve Melendez put them together in a time-lapse GIF. Click through to the full-size image.

Predicting Questions, Building Answers

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 16:43:00 -0500

With hurricane Sandy churning far off the Florida coast, we began anticipating questions people would have around the storm. And then we tried to code answers to those questions as fast as we could.

In order, those questions turned out to be:

Where’s the storm forecast to go? For this, we dusted off our Hurricane Tracker, built for hurricane Irene, and fed it with the National Weather Service data for Sandy. As with almost all of our work, we made it free and easy to embed, and many news outlets did.

What zone am I in? Again, we dusted off something made for Irene — our NYC Evacuation Zone Map. We updated it with better colors and areas newly designated as Zone A. We also published a project I’d been working on since Irene: a Storm Surge Map of the entire New York and New Jersey coastline.

Where’s the storm now? As the storm approached land, we switched layers in the hurricane tracker from the forecast track to a real-time radar image.

What systems are closing, and when? We knew there was a good chance the subways and other transit services would be shut down ahead of the storm. We also knew that there was no single place where all of that information resided. So days before the storm, we built our Transit Tracker. Thanks to Steve Melendez coding it over the weekend, we had it running when officials announced the transit shutdown plans. As an added bonus, the tracker is fed by a Google spreadsheet, so multiple producers can update it simultaneously.

Where’s the water rising? With everything shuttered, we wanted to help people watch the storm’s effects in real time. The National Weather Service maintains a network of flood-level monitors on the coast and on inland rivers. We took a feed off that system and modified it slightly to show pop-up charts for our Flood Gauge Watch — which we monitored through the storm.

As the storm hit, Melendez and I worked at WNYC under backup power making minor fixes and trying to catch up on our election-night mapping project.

After the storm, the team tackled two more questions:

What’s the traffic like? We heard traffic was gridlocked as people returned to work Wednesday, so we resurfaced our Traffic Map to show the trouble spots — which included most of Manhattan.

Which subway lines are open? Anticipating the subway system would open in stages, we wanted give people a map as the restoration progressed. I guessed that the MTA would provide a list of partially-open lines before they had maps, so Louise Ma built a beautiful base map from files left over from our Lost Subways project and prepared to update it. Melendez found a clever way to let people to pan and zoom it like a Google map. But I was wrong: The MTA issued clear PDF maps right away, so we scrapped Ma’s map and fed the official version into Melendez’s Changing Trains app.

There’s a lot more we wished we could have done — and could have done better. That may be the subject of another post. But we hope we what we made provided answers when they were needed.

- John Keefe

Map of Same-Sex Couples' Rights

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 16:59:00 -0400

Today we posted a new map to show the rights for same-sex couples across the US:

Louise Ma’s design really jumps out, and I like the way it works interactively.

We wrestled with this a lot — and were inspired by the great gay rights data visualization by Feilding Cage and the Guardian crew.

In the end, though, we decided to tell a smaller story, focusing on laws affecting same-sex couples. We tinkered with several cartograms and data charts, opting in the end for the US map.

Does it work for you? Let us know by tweeting at us @datanews.

— John Keefe