Link to Project

When looking at the Melville in London data, our group wanted to tell a story, of what exactly Melville was thinking as he moved between places in London. We decided to create an interactive animation of Melville’s journey throughout London. There is a slider that indicates the event number and the date at the top of the screen. It automatically moves through the points every 4 seconds to the next event in chronological order, refocusing the screen to where the marker has moved to. There is also a box at the bottom that indicates a location description that Melville or outside commentators wrote (Melville’s commentary is in quotation marks). This helps tell the story of Melville’s path across time. We also left markers on each point that were translucent so that the more opaque colors would indicate the places he visited often. They are also colored red for his first trip in November and blue for his second trip in December.

To clean the data to a legible state for Mapbox, we went through each line individually and either assigned it coordinates if we could find them or compressed its information to the prior line. This required a lot of somewhat subjective judgement on our part to determine what lat/long to pick and to figure out what data was incorrect.