We're creating a map for our last unit project in WR 2310! Caroline and I are working together and decided to create a map showing the costing of renting off campus apartments. We began by visiting the most used website for this, jumpoffcampus.com - this has listings of all available apartments. We took a screenshot of the map and used this to start plotting points.
We then sent out a google form asking where people live and how much they (individually) pay per month to get more data for our map and we received nearly 70 responses! Caroline and I split up plotting these points by putting them into an excel sheet to organize the responses and then plotted them on the map. We expected to see a trend with the colors we used to indicate prices but this is what we saw instead:
Our next step was to figure out a way to reinterpret this map to create something with more of a purpose.
I like your map because I think it would be valuable to students looking for an apartment. Though I would be careful combing the two sets of data. One shows available apartments and the other set shows apartments that are already lived in. You could differentiate these two sets by using a house symbols and a money sign ($) or other distinct symbols that can indicate whether or not a student can live there. It might also help if the purpose of your map is defined. Is it simply to show the cost of off campus housing or to guide students looking for off campus housing? Whatever your purpose is, it will help you condense your data.
ReplyDeleteOne way to represent cost is to generalize you data into sections, by that I mean the little pieces of land that are created by streets. You can look at the data for each little section and then find the average or median price. Using that number you can color the little of section of land whatever color that is equivalent to.
I think a nice addition to your map might be showing how much a student could save from living in off campus housing, if they do save money. From your survey do you know if students split rent with others or did they tell you the total cost of rent for their apartments? Because each gives a different perspective of the true price of apartments.
I think it is really hard for them to generalize the sections because the prices are all over the place. Landlords own properties throughout the city at times that are sometimes not near each other. Their prices with other landlords' prices can make it difficult to consider an area price consistent.
DeleteThe purpose of our comic definitely became helping students to find off campus housing in their budget and ways in which they could go about doing so. In our final, we add information including good/reliable landlords and their emails as well as a popular website for finding off campus housing. One of our main struggles was definitely finding a way to condense and generalize our data into larger sections but we managed to extrapolate a bit when creating our final.
DeleteI love this idea for a map! I think WPI should use this to provide for students! I do, however, agree with Greta that your audience is a bit unclear, even though I can try to guess who you are targeting. Also, that the map looks a little crazy and overwhelming because of the the frequency of colors. Maybe, limiting the map by distance from school and zooming into the map could help to improve this.
ReplyDeleteI think an element to add to this map is somehow incorporating how far school is from these apartments or at least from the streets. When I was looking for apartments, the first thing I considered was distance from school, because I primarily considered walking. I think it can be hard to indicate how much money people can save on these maps because everyone has different budgets to keep up with.
Another thing, I said this in class, but make sure that you are aware of how your colors are influencing your audience. The red can naturally indicate "bad" or "stop". So, unless you are doing that purposefully, I think you should change the color of the pegs to more neutral colors so that you are not influencing the choosing of places!
I'm so glad you like this idea! We definitely worked on ways to convey distance to important places including WPI and main streets such as Highland and West. From there, people can easily estimate the distance based on the apartments distance to certain places. We also changed the colors so that less expensive and more expensive aren't interpreted as good and bad.
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