Oakland Crimespotting Folks Talking Today

The folks behind the excellent Oakland Crimespotting are giving a talk today at the iSchool. If you haven't seen the site, it shows crime data from Oakland on a map, with different icons for different types of crime, and allowing you to browse through time using a sliding, expandable window over a bar graph. Pretty sweet use of Flash. Here's the talk info:

Design Futures lecture series sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media and the UC Berkeley School of Information TODAY Thursday March 20 5:15-6:30pm 110 South Hall UC Berkeley Mike Migurski and Tom Carden, Stamen Design Visual Urban Data: A Journey Through Oakland Crimespotting A talk about the political, social and technical hiccoughs encountered since the inception of Stamen Design’s Oakland Crimespotting project just over a year ago. The talk will cover the inspirations and influences of the project, and how it relates to Stamen’s recent work in web-based information visualization and mapping. About Stamen Since 2001, Stamen has developed a reputation for beautiful and technologically sophisticated projects in a diverse range of commercial and cultural settings. They work and play with a surprising and growing range of collaborators: news media, financial institutions, artists and architects, car manufacturers, design agencies, museums, technology firms, political action committes, and universities.

Comments

[Steve Wilderman]

It's certainly a pretty site, but the data reported isn't very accurate due to the screen scraping technique they use - they're not getting to the underlying data (they can't, that's in a SQL Server database behind a firewall), so they're displaying only the data that shows on the image. Since there may be more than one incident at a given location, they cannot see that since the map symbology is overlaid on top of each other. So, it's nice, pretty, eye candy, but hardly an authentic source of crime data.

Oh, and be sure to ask them why they were down a few weeks ago. Their mechanism for scraping the data was viewed a s DoS attack against the City's own website. SO many requests were being received from their IP that none of the other citizens of Oakland could use the site. More than 95% of all the hits that Oakland received were from Crimespotting during one interval we looked at.

[Ken-ichi]

Hi Steve,

I gathered from the talk that while they were originaly parsing the images provided through OPD's own crime mapping application, after the recent outage you mentioned the Oakland City IT dept. granted them access to text-based tabular data, so I think a lot of uncertainty involved in the image scraping is now gone. Mike Migurski is one of the developers, and he has .

I would also argue that the site is not just eye candy, even if their data are incomplete. Their emphasis on providing more of the data , without insisting that users jump through a bunch of query filter hoops, lowers the barrier to exploring the data. Instead of being greeted with a form off the bat, which might make you think, "Ugh, bureaucracy," you see data on a map, which immediately prompts the question, "What kind of crimes are happening in neighborhood?" In my mind, the sooner a visualization has you asking questions about the data, the better it is. The best ones enable you to answer those questions, and to a large extent, CrimeSpotting does that too.