“HereHere NYC generates weekly cartoons for NYC neighborhoods based on public data. We sum up how your neighborhood, or other NYC neighborhoods you care about, are doing via weekly email digest, neighborhood-specific Twitter & Instagram feeds, and with deeper data and context.
HereHere is a research project from FUSE Labs, Microsoft Research that explores:
- Creating compelling stories with data to engage larger communities
- Inventing new habits for connecting to the hyperlocal
- Using cartoons as a tool to drive data engagement
HereHere does not use sentiment analysis, but uses a research platform with the intention of surfacing the most pertinent information with a human perspective. …
How It Works
Several times a day we grab the freshest NYC 311 data. The data comes in as a long list of categorized concerns issued by people in NYC (either via phone, email, or text message) and range from heating complaints to compliments to concerns about harboring bees and everything in between.
We separate the data by neighborhood for each of the 42 neighborhoods throughout the 5 boroughs of NYC, and count the total of each concern per neighborhood.
Next, we process the data through the Sentient Data Server. SDS equips each neighborhood with a personality (like a character in a movie or videogame) and we calculate the character’s response to the latest data based on pace, position and trend. For example, a neighborhood might be delighted if after several days of more than 30 heating complaints, heating complaints drops down to 0; or a neighborhood might be ashamed to see a sudden rise in homeless person assistance requests.
HereHere determines the most critical 311 issues for each neighborhood each week and uses that to procedurally generate a weekly cartoon for each neighborhood.