Final Project

For my final project in ISTA 401 I designed a program that could visualize data about the crimes that occur in the dorms at the University of Arizona. This particular data was from 2009, the year I happened to live in the dorms. My partner Alex and I made a program that contained a list of all the crimes alongside a map of all the dorms at U of A. Here is a picture of our program being run:

For each crime on the left side there is a corresponding ellipse or 'button' that can be selected or 'activated.' If a crime becomes selected, the program will create a transparent colored circle on the UA map around the corresponding dorm. The map will show the viewer all the dorms that contain instances of these crimes. A physical number appears in the center of the transparent circles that show the count of crime at that location. 

Here is a picture of our program with some crimes selected:

We loaded in a txt file with all the counts of all the crimes at each dorm. We split each value by a comma and created multiple arrays of ints. We created a crime class which draws all the crimes on the left with the button and we also created a CrimeMarker class which puts the transparent circles over the map.

We were trying to take a data set about a particular year of crime inside the University of Arizona dorms and  visualize it in a cool and exciting way. I this was very successful as an interactive data visualization. This visualization could be a useful tool for a group that deals with this type of data every day like the police. Alex and I would eventually want to add more years of data and have the user choose which year he wants to view. One of my other ideas was to use the data to predict where crime might occur in future years.  

My Role:

Alex and I worked really hard on this project. I wrote a lot of the code, including the buttons and list of crimes on the left side. I found the x and y coordinates of each dorm on our map of U of A (to indicate where to draw the circle if that dorm had a crime occur). I created the crime class where it can detect if the mouse is over a crime button and when it is selected. I also made another class called CrimeMarker which draws the transparent circle over the map of dorms. It has the x and y coordinated I recorded earlier and a radius to decide how big the circle would appear on the map (this depended on how many occurrences of a particular crime there are in that dorm). I made sure that each crime was assigned a color. Alex helped me assign the colors based on crime level or type. In all, this was a team effort with a pretty cool turnout!