The left panel describes the assault per capital (10 000 people in each of the neighbourhood. Each neighbourhood has its own colour. The size and style of the line responds to the category and range that the type of assault falls under.

The darker grey bar corresponds to the total rate of assault per 10 000. The white rectangle inside represents the rate of assault of that type. Each line branching from this label leads to a neighbourhood. It can be traced in order to see which neighbourhood has had this type of assault. More assault breaks down the other types of assault found on the data set.

The bar represents household income. To the right and left of the bar is the rate of assault in each individual neighbourhood. The neighbourhoods are sorted by population. The colour sections of the bar indicate the household income, with a scale leading to 100% so that the numerical value can be extracted. Call outs of the largest and smallest rates are included to point to significant data points. 

This project is designed to compare income with the violent crimes of Assault and Robbery. This allows users to see which neighbourhoods have a high rate of assault or not in order to choose places to live.

Data

Sorted through the policed data sheets of individual crimes in the year 2016. For assaults there was 29 columns and 18333 rows. For Robberies, there was 29 columns and 3597 rows. I used excel to sort through these functions and come up with summary data tables. I also went through each data sheet for the 20 neighbourhoods of Scarborough and broke down the income into sections and the total population. I chose to include population so that an invested user can calculate the total number of criminal activity by multiplying it be the rate.

Process

When I started conceptualizing ideas for info-graphics, I wanted to relate the visuals to neighbourhoods. I did not yet have data or know what data was available. I imagined bar graphs as cities,  with axes as roads, decorated with clouds parks, cars and trees that may or may not show other data, I drew various graphs and ideas that I thought would work well for a multitude of data. I then narrowed down the research to crime and experimented with bar graphs that resemble bullets shot from guns or pie charts that use a third dimension to convey more information. I liked the look of flowcharts, with smooth curved lines and wanted to incorporate that somehow into the final graph. I also looked at various bar graphs and circular graphs and continued to experiment  with the idea of a 3 dimensional city block bar graph. I created more iterations of different ideas, this time with the map of Toronto in mind. Every element should be connected in some way. I tried implementing icons into the map of Toronto.  However, the shape of Toronto was not that elegant and did not look pleasing. I did not want to be stuck creating a graph in the shape of Toronto.

I continued developing the hexagonal statistical chart but soon realized that I could not fit a lot of data into the chart. Hexagonal statistical charts are also harder to compare than bars. I first wanted to use  some kind of circle format, as circles draw the viewer in. and generate visual interest. I started to get into the idea of using a flow chart to divide up certain neighborhoods together, but this time in an automotive and fatal accident context. I liked the look of the smooth lines, circles or long curves. 

As I researched more data I started to find a lot of data on the crimes in Toronto. I also discovered that there was census data for each neighbourhood on housing, income, demographics, language,  trends and locations. I then came up with a three part diagram that showed the amount of robberies and assaults on a scale connected to a flow chart indicating which neighbourhood is on the scale.  This would be on both ends of an area chart that represents 100% of a value for the neighbourhood, which in the beginning was thought to be marriage. Therefore the viewer can follow the  flowchart to see how many assaults occurred in that neighbourhood and then continue the line to view the rate of divorce, marriage, etc. and then the viewer could see the amount of assault.

Then I created more iterations of this idea, and realized it would be cleaner and simpler if I used types of assault and robbery instead of a scale of assault and robbery. So I would have less  data points scattered upon one axis and focused on certain points. I could use the line weight as a means of indicating the density of assault or robbery in a neighbourhood. In these next iterations, I had the bar graph mainly complete, I was just looking at different ways of making the layout look good and experimenting with the various elements of the graph. 

I experimented with the colour scheme, changed the type of population used. Created a more involved legend. Put in an introduction, and changed the green colour to grey to highlight the sides. Right now, the info-graphic flowchart is organized by type, with the colour dividing each type into different sections. The important highlights are boxed around the main neighbourhoods. Furthermore, the “more” offence types were set to white because of there thin height in order to make them stand off of the off black. The introduction was inputted. however it did not feel balanced.

Conclusion

So how does income relate to violent crime in Scarborough? from looking at the info-graphic, I could see that the neighbourhoods with the highest percentage of low income earners did not  have the highest violent crime rate in either robbery or assault. The main correlation between income and crime appears in the neighbourhoods with a high percentage of upper-class income earners. This project was very interesting but took a lot of time and effort in unnecessary places. I spent a lot of time learning google sheets and could not have any content because I could not find the right  data or ideas by the third week. However, the critiques were very helpful and helped me clean up and focus my information and visualization.

I am excited to provide an interactive element to hide a lot of the content to make it simpler and also adding different modes of hierarchy to shift the neighbourhoods around. It would be cool to animate the different cells moving with the curved flowchart. I have learned a lot about google sheets and data sets. It would have been better if I could find these in the beginning of the class.