Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Jackson Pollock's Hoods in San Francisco


The Neighborhood Project has decided to redraw San Francisco's neighborhoods based on Craiglist listings and the power of the crowd. The project is using address and neighborhood data used in housing posts on Craigslist and also data from visitors to the Neighborhood Project website.

The resulting map looks a little like how I imagine Jackson Pollock would design a neighborhood map of this Californian city. This reason for this is that the map uses a 'blobby' algorithm for drawing the neighborhoods. Each neighborhood point on the map acts like a magnet, and the resulting neighborhood is "the region where the combined attraction of all those magnets is above a certain strength".

You can read about other crowdsourced neighborhood boundary projects in Boston, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver on this Crowdsourced Neighborhood Boundaries post. If you live in New York then you might want to look at New York's Crowdsourced Neighborhoods.

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