Madison civic data @ Wolfram Demonstrations Project
8 views
Skip to first unread message
Ethan Beihl
Nov 23, 2016, 5:42:02 PM11/23/16
to HackingMadison
After about a year's delay (my fault), a little applet I wrote using Madison residential parcel data has finally been published at the Wolfram Demonstrations project.
The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is a collection of interactive demos and educational toys written with the Wolfram Language (née Mathematica), mostly in math, science and engineering, but basically also anything else. They run on the free* CDF Player plugin, which you can get here -- be warned that it's a monster at about 1gig.
I wrote this Demonstration not long after I first moved here, just exploring some of the data available. I wouldn't call it "civic hacking," per se... technical requirements restricted me to a pretty tame 1-dimensional visualization; and without any external context (where is Ward 121? how many people live in a "3+ unit apartment"?), it's hard to draw meaningful conclusions. But as a proof of concept, I think it's pretty cool. If anyone else around here has interest in Mathematica, I can tell you with little reservation that it's a powerful tool for exploring civic datasets, and visualizing them right out of the box.
*Beer. Anyone who knows Wolfram Research well knows why this is a laughable clarification.
Tangentially related, here are some other pretty things that were almost trivial to do in Mathematica once I figured out how to clean the data:
Left: Acreage of public parkland per Aldermanic District in Madison. Varies from 4.7 (Purple) to 438.0 (Red), with an outlier of 1262.4 in District 18 (top center), which includes the Cherokee Lake area.
Right: Voronoi basins for nearest Madison municipal parks (green). Note that coordinates given in the dataset are those supplied by the city to locate the parks; for larger parks the distance to these points may not be the distance to the park. This is perhaps most obvious in the Wingra area -- miles of parkland are represented by just a handful of points.
The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is a collection of interactive demos and educational toys written with the Wolfram Language (née Mathematica), mostly in math, science and engineering, but basically also anything else. They run on the free* CDF Player plugin, which you can get here -- be warned that it's a monster at about 1gig.
I wrote this Demonstration not long after I first moved here, just exploring some of the data available. I wouldn't call it "civic hacking," per se... technical requirements restricted me to a pretty tame 1-dimensional visualization; and without any external context (where is Ward 121? how many people live in a "3+ unit apartment"?), it's hard to draw meaningful conclusions. But as a proof of concept, I think it's pretty cool. If anyone else around here has interest in Mathematica, I can tell you with little reservation that it's a powerful tool for exploring civic datasets, and visualizing them right out of the box.
*Beer. Anyone who knows Wolfram Research well knows why this is a laughable clarification.
Tangentially related, here are some other pretty things that were almost trivial to do in Mathematica once I figured out how to clean the data:
Left: Acreage of public parkland per Aldermanic District in Madison. Varies from 4.7 (Purple) to 438.0 (Red), with an outlier of 1262.4 in District 18 (top center), which includes the Cherokee Lake area.
Right: Voronoi basins for nearest Madison municipal parks (green). Note that coordinates given in the dataset are those supplied by the city to locate the parks; for larger parks the distance to these points may not be the distance to the park. This is perhaps most obvious in the Wingra area -- miles of parkland are represented by just a handful of points.
Greg Tracy
Nov 24, 2016, 12:00:57 AM11/24/16
to HackingMadison
Congrats, Ethan. Great work!
Cheers.
Greg
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "HackingMadison" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to hackingmadiso...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to hacking...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/hackingmadison/37b4f9f1-9303-4d12-a447-18afdcfc0cb7%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages