Chapter 6 Interactive component

6.1 New York State County-level Map

This map contains hate crimes data of counties in New York State. Once you mouse over the region, it will show its statistics of hate crimes on the side, helping you understand hate crime situation in different counties in a more straight way. With an interative map, audiences are able to know which region is which county, which is hard to achieve in the static heatmap as we conducted in the previous questions. In the static heatmap, if we label all the counties, the heatmap will become messy and difficult to view due to its relatively small size. An interactive map has the advantanges to show geological locations and their corresponding information and statistical data at the same time. Therefore, audiences can have better understanding of various types of hate crimes in different regions.

The map data are provided on Wikimedia Commons. They were created using US Census Data in 2005 and Adobe Illustrator. You will probably notice that no data are showing up for NYC, Bronx and Long Island. That’s because some counties are created as “polygon” and some are “path”. Therefore, it’s hard to color them using D3 functions at the same time. We are still in the progress of learning D3, and we will make it in better view in the future.