Final data visualization assignment for MOOC

Here is my last submitted assignment for the Data Visualization course I’ve been taking. We were asked to find data — any data — that was of interest to us and determine the best way to present it to readers.

Here in Seattle, we are lucky that the city provides a great data resource for all sorts of information. As someone who has worked in Communications my entire career, I was personally interested in the robust list of community news sources in the city broken down by neighborhood. It’s granular to the level of email list-serves in various neighborhoods. Here is the data I was working with.

This data set obviously lends itself best to an interactive map format, so I took to Google Maps to plot out what I thought was relevant for a resident of a particular neighborhood and for someone wishing to get their news covered. Here is what I came up with (click for full size):

This isn’t complete in that I wasn’t able to plot out all of the neighborhoods (or very accurately plot the neighborhoods that are already included), but it gives a good idea of where I’m headed. Part of the information here is from city data, but I would also have to do a fair amount of researching to find things like actual neighborhood boundaries, reporter name, phone number, news tip link/email and related news from Twitter.

I’m extremely interested in pursuing this further as a live product because we have a really active hyperlocal news community here and I think it could be really useful with the right info and an efficient way to keep it updated.