SHADYSIDE TALKS

The premise of this project is the 'City Portraits & Caricatures' project by Pedro Cruz & Penousal Machado. The data visualizers contend that while scientific representation is useful and critical in its own context. However, the sterilization of data is in many cases unnecessary. They make the case for how no data is truly neutral and consequently 'figurative' visualization may be key to communicate data. If done well, figurative visualization can seemingly simplify data by being suggestive about its exaggerations and hence making it intuitive to read.

For ‘Urban Caricatures’, I wanted to speak about project that was closer home. I live in Shadyside and have experienced it to be a quiet neighborhood but wanted to know a little bit more how evocative its residents can be. How much do people care about Shadyside? The easiest way to find this was to assess 311 Complaints made from Shadyside.

https://data.wprdc.org/dataset/311-data

To do this I sought the WPRDC data on it and then mined those fields that related to Shadyside. There were 3619 records of complaints between 1st November 2016 to 9th December 2016 from Shadyside alone. Of these 32 departments were reached out via 7 mediums including Twitter.