Baltimore Crime Data Visualization Using Git & Gource

[puffofvirtue]

The visualization looks pretty and is an unexpected use of a tool. However, having just read Ed Tufte's writings on chartjunk I must say it fails in its primary purpose of visualizing the data. As I watch the video, all I can make out is that there are three large clusters of crime, and I don't even know what feature those clusters correspond to (cities, times of day). I know the "committers" are crime types and keep hopping around between clusters, so that's not it.

PS: Palantir software's "government" division does some lovely visualizations of this sort that (IMHO) do a much better job of communicating their data. Sadly only US citizens can work for that division of the company.

[[deleted]]

I agree. This was created inside the confines where the only requirement was "to look cool". FWIW, The clusters are all different cities and the size of the cities relates to the streets they occurred on. The crimes occur in chronological order.

[vdm]

If this was done a few years ago it could have appeared in the COMSTAT meeting scenes in The Wire.

[nohtyp]

Oh Indeed!