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

[Michal Migurski]

Steve,

In fact, the CrimeWatch application that we once had to scrape for data did allow us to see multiple reports in a single location. Simulated clicks on overlapping icons resulted in detail windows for the multiple reports located there, all of which were included in our application. Ken-Ichi is right, though - after eight continuous months of scraping the site without causing notice from January 2007 when I initially experimented with the data to August 2007 when Crimespotting launched (we did this on a nightly basis, starting at 2:00am when minimal interference with normal usage would occur), the City IT Dept. decided to block our IP address from access to the site. We were down for several months while the City's gears slowly turned, and have now been assisted with a more reliable, text-based feed of addresses and reports details that takes mere minutes to parse and consume.

[Brain Off » In Californi]

[...] more possibility to have an affect in your local government. Oakland Crimespotting motivated the Oakland PD to release their data in a machine readable format. Merano Italy released a treasure trove of CC-SA data. Inspire your local government with these [...]