Categories
Academia

Urban Informatics and Visualization at UC Berkeley

The fall semester begins next week at UC Berkeley. For the third year in a row, Paul Waddell and I will be teaching CP255: Urban Informatics and Visualization, and this is my first year as co-lead instructor.

This masters-level course trains students to analyze urban data, develop indicators, conduct spatial analyses, create data visualizations, and build Paris open datainteractive web maps. To do this, we use the Python programming language, open source analysis and visualization tools, and public data.

This course is designed to provide future city planners with a toolkit of technical skills for quantitative problem solving. We don’t require any prior programming experience – we teach this from the ground up – but we do expect prior knowledge of basic statistics and GIS.

Update, September 2017: I am no longer a Berkeley GSI, but Paul’s class is ongoing. Check out his fantastic teaching materials in his GitHub repo. From my experiences here, I have developed a course series on urban data science with Python and Jupyter, available in this GitHub repo.

Categories
Data

Visualizing Summer Travels

projected-shapefile-gps-coordinatesThis is a series of posts about visualizing spatial data. I spent a couple of months traveling in Europe this summer and collected GPS location data throughout the trip with the OpenPaths app. I explored different web mapping technologies such as CartoDB, Leaflet, Mapbox, and Tilemill to plot my travels. I also used Python and matplotlib to run some descriptive statistics and visualize other aspects of my trip.

Here is the series of posts:

My Python code is available in this GitHub repo. I also did some more involved work under the hood to prep the data and support these visualizations. For example, in the following posts I reverse-geocoded the spatial data set and reduced its size with clustering algorithms and the Douglas-Peucker algorithm:

Categories
Data

Visualizing Summer Travels Part 4: Mapbox + Tilemill

This post is part of a series on visualizing data from my summer travels.

I’ve previously discussed my goals in visualizing GPS data from my summer travels and explored visualizing the data set with CartoDB and with Leaflet. The full OpenPaths location data from my summer travels is available here and I discussed how I reverse-geocoded it here.

Mapbox is a major provider of online web mapping services such as tiled web maps, the Tilemill cartography IDE, and the mapbox.js javascript library. Today I’ll run through how to create an interactive data map in Tilemill’s design studio, export the map as a set of tiles, upload the tileset to Mapbox, and then use a javascript client to display the map on a web page. Our final result will look something like this: