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October 4, 2015

Dear Data Two | Week 24: Doors - How Colourful is My Neighbourhood?

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When I saw the topic for week 24, I immediately knew what I wanted to create. In California, our neighborhood was managed by a homeowner’s association, which meant uniformity everywhere, including every house door being black. One of the first things I noticed upon moving to our home in Kingston was how colourful the doors are.

Since there are so many homes on each street (townhouse/terrace style homes mostly), it was going to take quite some time to document all of the door colours. My wonderful daughter walked me with to help with the survey; I wrote down the door colours while she told me what they were. We got a few bizarre looks from people. Given that I was writing in a notebook as we looked at each house, it wasn’t too surprising.

When I started entering the data into Excel, I realized that I didn’t write down the house numbers. So out we went again for a second survey. After entering all of the data, I copied the addresses into Batch Geocoder to get the latitude and longitude for each address.

Next, I create a custom black and white Mapbox map for use in Tableau. I initially used a house shape for each house, but when I was showing this to people at the Data School, they thought it looked to cluttered, so I stuck with circles.

My postcard looks pretty similar to Tableau in terms of style. However, I think my postcard looks cleaner and simpler. I almost felt like an architect or city planner creating this map.

Enjoy!

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