Comments on: I made a movie

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:27:59 +0000

The reason I faded them to gray was so that “current” crimes would be emphasized — even if older crimes are darker, it’s hard to pick out currently-occurring crimes over top of them.
But I agree that that would be an interesting visualization, and I have tried running it that way. I think it will be just as good as a high-quality cumulative render, though. I’ll try to find some time to do that soon.

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:23:56 +0000

Why did you fade the colors to gray? I’d like to see the cumulative differences in distribution of the three categories of crime. Fading to a lower intensity of the original color would allow that.

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:32:58 +0000

Those are great suggestions, Tim. The one about crime per capita had occurred to me, too — I’d also like to plot it versus income. But I think I’m going to have to go pester Mr. Goodspeed about how to go about getting that data.
The aggregation idea is one I can pursue immediately, though.

By: Tim Lee

Tim Lee — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:27:58 +0000

I think it would be interesting if you could aggregate the data a bit. For example, instead of a dot for every crime and a from every shift, would it be feasible to aggregate it into geographic and temporal buckets (with each bucket representing say a square mile and a week) and then display a dot whose size or color indicates the total number of crimes during that period?
Another interesting extension to this would be to adjust for population, so that the dots represent per capita crime rates. Right now, it looks like most of the crime happens in a cluster slightly North and West of the capital. I’m assuming that that’s largely because NW is where a lot of the people are.
Naturally, I don’t know how much work any of these ideas would be.