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Philadelphia budget data visualization

budget.brettmandel.com

21–30 of 63 posts

Re: Philadelphia budget data visualization

#21

Neat. Was some tool used to construct this, or was it done manually? What may not be obvious to people initially when they look at it, is that when you see the label "Department of Finance" on the gray rectangle that is actually the label for the gray rectangle plus the green and orange ones adjacent to it -- the different colors represent the expenditure classes described on the "About" page. It would perhaps be cle…

The treemap was made using D3 with some customizations. All the source and datasets are on github. The department groupings are done with spacing. They are subtle, I know. Right at this moment, I am adding color coding to the About modal.

Mind sharing the github link?

Re: Philadelphia budget data visualization

#22
This is a nice visualisation but it's not clear to me what the purpose of it is - other than the immediate "WOW look how much is spent on Police + Prisons!" that struck me. Or is it simply a "check it out, I know what comprises Philadelphia's budget...".

I'm a total outsider so I admit it's entirely likely that this means something to folks living there. But either way it would be nice if there was a little blurb on what he's trying to say or some attempt to explain what the budget would look like if he was elected. As it is this is simply "Look at this budget, just look at it".

Re: Philadelphia budget data visualization

#24
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The treemap was made using D3 with some customizations. All the source and datasets are on github. The department groupings are done with spacing. They are subtle, I know. Right at this moment, I am adding color coding to the About modal.

Mind sharing the github link?

https://github.com/bengarvey/budget

Re: Philadelphia budget data visualization

#26
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The treemap was made using D3 with some customizations. All the source and datasets are on github. The department groupings are done with spacing. They are subtle, I know. Right at this moment, I am adding color coding to the About modal.

Mind sharing the github link?

http://github.com/bengarvey/budget

Re: Philadelphia budget data visualization

#27
If you want to make some budget visualizations of your own, let me link this site we've been working on:

http://openspending.org/help/index.html

It's powering a variety of budget sites, like http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/, http://bund.offenerhaushalt.de/ and http://cameroon.openspending.org/en/. People can just go an upload their own data quickly - OpenStreetMap for money :)

Re: Philadelphia budget data visualization

#28
post #22

This is a nice visualisation but it's not clear to me what the purpose of it is - other than the immediate "WOW look how much is spent on Police + Prisons!" that struck me. Or is it simply a "check it out, I know what comprises Philadelphia's budget...". I'm a total outsider so I admit it's entirely likely that this means something to folks living there. But either way it would be nice if there was a little blurb on…

That's info can be found on the main site http://brettmandel.com

Re: Philadelphia budget data visualization

#30
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brett and I worked together on the project.

Great job! Can you speak (or maybe a blog post would be better) about how you put this together? What did you have to do get/massage the data? What tech did you use, etc? It's nice to see stuff like this coming out of Philly.

The site uses D3.js http://d3js.org. I'll write up a full recap later.
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