Visualizations of Race and Money in Chicago
November 2, 2007
white and black workers in Chicago
I started a submission to the InfoVis 2006 contest last year, but I decided not to submit it a few weeks before the deadline. The code has hung around my Processing directory for over a year, untouched. During an after-class chat, I brought it up with Karrie and she suggested that I put it here. I decided not to submit mostly because I was a naive first-year student. (The data contains a significant amount of noise — the locations are not exact, for example — but the “triangulation” from many different individual surveys evens it out, IMO.)
The image above shows three screenshots from a visualization of white and black workers in Chicago. Chicago is a notoriously segregated city, and I was interested in whether jobs do anything to bring whites and blacks together. I extracted the data from the 1% PUMS Census dataset. The visualization makes the following mappings: worker’s home (center of circle), race (circle color), length of daily commute to work (size of circle, animates through the commute) and the aggregation of all workers in Chicago at any moment of the day. The visualization animates through time, but unfortunately I could not get Processing’s movie maker library to give me something presentable.
the concentration of wealth in Chicago at different times of the day
The second image (above) remaps yearly salary to color (to the saturation of green, particularly). You can watch the city wake up, and you can see when the poor, the middle-class and the very wealthy stockbrokers leave for work in the morning. There is a substantial second-shift around 2:00 PM as well. (I wish the Census data included “return home” time too, but alas.) It’s really quite neat in animation: I included a little feature that highlights all the people just leaving for work, then fades them to their appropriate colors shortly thereafter.
