5/22/2022 - Adding access to deprecated maps from older projects

The purpose of this blog post is to briefly revisit two old projects that were not linked through my website, but were linked through projects in symposiums that no longer offer access, or were lost to major updates on my website. You can find the links here:

Plot Map of the Eastern District of Baltimore 2019
Chloropleth Map of Crime by Baltimore Neighborhood 2019

The first of these maps was developed as a follow-up study to my role on the Billie Holiday Project. I wanted to look at the exact same area in Baltimore as our crime map from the 1920's and see how the current day crime data compared to back then. Essentially, I was asking: 'has it gotten any better?' You can toggle through the different types of incidents or click on a dot for a specific type of crime.

The second map is a more general version of this same question. If crime has improved in this neighborhood, does that mean that crime is low everywhere, or just localized to particular places? (considering the history of redling in Baltimore, the hypothesis is that these areas would still be feeling the effects of redlining which were never remedied) Additionally, I also wanted to expand my coding ability in R, specifically for spatial mapping, and this provided a nice challenge to work on these skills. The resulting map shows each neighborhood in Baltimore and the number of incidents divided by the total square miles of that neighborhood. The idea was to get a sense of the density of crime, rather than just the number of crimes in a given area. I could've done this by looking at the population in each neighborhood, but I honestly didn't know how to combine that information at the time (nor did I think to); in the end, both achieve a general sense of density, and land area gives you a better sense of 'how safe am I walking around here?' since it's easier to understand the size of an area than the population for most people.

Both of these projects were done using leaflet in R, alongside some other geospatial packages. I would provide my code for these two projects, but the code no longer works and I don't currently feel like revisiting these projects to fix it.