Cultural Organizations of New York City

Data 70600: Intro to JavaScript | Fall 2023

Ian Williams

Data Sources

This is an interactive map of cultural organizations in New York City, using data sourced from NYC Open Data. The data set was provided by the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA). It also uses data from betaNYC for NYC neighborhood boundaries, which we used in Lesson 14.

Rationale

I study organizations, so I am interested in what the taxonomy of cultural organizations is within this list. Looking at the agency's website, there is a list of organizations that provide services, but no map or guide that is easily navigable. There is also not a definitive taxonomy of the types of cultural organizations. Exploring the data set helped me to see that in DCLA's implicit taxonomy, there are 20 types, classified as "Discipline."

This project renders a spatial representation of the organizations, layered over NYC neighborhood boundaries we used in a class exercise, offering a way to explore the distribution of cultural organizations across neighborhoods.

Of course, the neighborhood definitions are also different in some cases, as evidenced in the pop-up labels.

Since this final project is a minimum viable product, I can't go into the level of detail I would like to. But I may tinker and improve over time.

Future improvements

Some things to add could include choropleth shading to show organizational density across boroughs, custom icons for each type of organization, and a drop-down menu that can sort between the different types or display by borough.

Note: from the data, over 500 organizations did not have geocoordinates and thus were filtered out from the dataset displayed here. I used R to process the data in CSV format before converting it to JSON, as I am more familiar with it than JavaScript. No websites for the organizations were included in the data. The data set lists 20 different variables for "Discipline" with no further explanation.