postarchitectural

I went back to New York a couple weeks ago, and staying in DUMBO while trying to pretend I lived in Williamsburg again put the subway back on my mind [and brought back memories of my commute to DUMBO, taking the J in to Essex then the F back out to York].

Then a couple days after I got back, I saw Mike Frumin’s post Spark It Up. It’s pretty gorgeous, and tells a lot of little fascinating stories, but what really tickled me was the fat spreadsheet of MTA ridership data Frumin used to create the map.

My first thought was to do something like my mapping of spending in the city — that sea of sparklines just demanded a z-axis. But I wanted to be able to scrub back and forth in time, so I started working on a ModestMaps-powered map with a time slider. After getting the data into the right shape, it was pretty quick to get something simple but interactive and visual up.

Some of the immediate things I realized, scrubbing back and forth in time, was just how high ridership used to be in the 1940s and 1950s, though significant changes like the token to Metrocard / Unlimited Metrocard seem to be affecting ridership. Here’s an atrophied 1977 vs 2006:

I can’t say much more about the data than Frumin’s original post, but it is pretty great to watch Midtown act as the throbbing heart of Manhattan, and the various lines spidering out into the Bronx.

After getting great feedback from my awesome coworkers at Stamen, I added some context to the time slider and some tooltips that feel about right to my eyes [writing the MTABadge class was especially fun]. Also, I set up a relative scaling mode, where all stations are scaled relative to their respective maximums. This gives you the Williamsburg boom that’s otherwise dwarfed by the volume of Midtown traffic.

The current piece is up now, here.

The Last.fm Spirals project was something I did over the summer, after mucking around with the iTunes visualization earlier in the year. It’s been broken for a while, so I’m posting some screenshots here until I fix it.

The idea behind the project was to explore trends biased based on time. Last.fm keeps track of your top artists every given week, month, or year, so the Spirals project just needs a valid username to generate the graphic. 

The images are also posted to a tumblr site, where now a few thousand of them live. They can be embedded into Last.fm profiles, etc. It’s sort of great to look at a whole collection of them. The more artists someone listens to, the more varied the colors get, and the more volatile a user’s top 10 is every week, the more the peaks and valleys get. 

So, I’ve been using Mint.com for about a year now, and it’s made me more conscious about what I spend my money on. Setting budgets and tracking trends is pretty basic on Mint, but automatically categorizing and generating a whole history of spending is awesome. 

While I was unemployed in New York [what a great way to become hyperconscious of your spending], I did a .csv dump from Mint and geocoded the transactions that I could. From there it was a matter of going from the .csv to Flash, and pumping out a MELscript file that would generate an animated Maya file. The only post I did was to run an occlusion pass and add the map texture, then set up a camera to view the animation. 

In the end it was pretty cool to see where my spending stacked up [literally]. Blue blocks are groceries purchases, and since I lived in Williamsburg and worked in DUMBO, those two spots pile up pretty quickly. Green blocks are for restaurants / other food expenses, which end up all along Bedford in Williamsburg and scattered in SoHo and Union Square / East Village area. There’s a big spike in yellow [shopping] at Century 21 and a couple spots on Broadway in SoHo, and the purple are ‘entertainment’ purchases — the big spike in midtown was a Blonde Redhead show at Terminal 5, with a couple smaller ones at Music Hall of Williamsburg and Bowery Ballroom. 

A lot of the more interesting activity, though, is buried under ATM withdrawals and cash purchases. Since doing this I’ve actually gotten a lot more anal about using my card for as much as possible, even cheap tacos on Mission [sorry!].

Here’s the video on Vimeo:

Spending in New York on Vimeo.