Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Where are New York's Hoods?



Back in 2015 DNAInfo asked New Yorkers to draw their neighborhood boundaries on an interactive map. More than 12,000 people drew outlines where they thought their neighborhood's borders existed. Unfortunately the map which DNAInfo created from the results no longer seems to exist.

Luckily Adam Pearce appears to have access to the data and has created his own map of New York Neighborhoods Drawn by  New Yorkers. The interactive map provides a great visualization of where New Yorker's think their neighborhoods begin and end. The map includes a link to an interesting article called Uncertainty Over Space, which briefly explores how AI might be used to explore and visualize the borders between different neighborhoods based on these crowdsourced outlines. The map also has its own GitHub page.



While it can be interesting to explore where people think they live it can be just as interesting to find out what they think about where they live. Hoodmaps can help you discover what people think about different neighborhoods with its crowdsourced city maps - annotated and labeled by locals.

Hoodmaps has two main ways to show you what the locals think about different parts of a city. One way is by coloring the map by its dominant characteristic. Different colors are used to paint neighborhoods  as being either Students, Hipsters, Tourists, Rich, Suits or Normies. The color that you see is the dominant color from all the user inputs. Users can also provide more individual assessments of specific locations by adding a custom label to the map. For example, in New York users have tagged neighborhoods as 'hipsters with rich parents', 'Hasidic' and 'Polish' (among other things).

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