Knight Lab's Toolkit

One of my favorite toolkits of late comes from Northwestern University's Knight Lab. I made use of their image comparison tool, Juxtapose, in an earlier post looking at change over time in a Detroit neighborhood.

This time around I wanted to try out StoryMap -- the Knight Lab's fabulous contribution to displaying a series of events on a map supported by video, photography, social media, and text. For a subject matter to explore, I thought I'd take a look at a week's worth of structure-damaging fires in Detroit.

The Subject

Surveyors working on Motor City Mapping keep close tabs on every structure damaging fire in Detroit -- each is surveyed usually within a day of the fire. The city is especially vulnerable to structure damaging fires -- arson in Detroit is a well-known and persistent problem.

Telling this story is challenging. Conveying the scale of damage across the size of the city, the challenges faced by the Detroit Fire Department... Detroit's Motor City Muckraker has taken on the task of documenting each of the city's fires, and while StoryMap wouldn't be ideal for presenting thousands of fires, it is perfect for presenting a slice of time that is indicative of the whole. In the map above you'll see 53 structure fires over seven days in Detroit. Typically Detroit averages 14 fires / day, the week above is around 8 / day.

The Process

As I started building my StoryMap I realized I was following a very repetitive process -- saving the image, titling the photo with the address, copy & pasting the notes. My colleague, Mike Evans, saw what I was doing and said, "Hey stop that, I bet we can publish automatically from the Regrid Mapping Platform."

The Regrid Mapping Platform gives you access to all the parcels and data that we present publicly, but in your own private Regrid universe. You can develop your own survey questions, pipe in data from open data portals, build and color code parcel maps, and build queries of the information in your maps.

Once you've done all that in Regrid, we want to give you options if you want to share and publish your maps. Of course, Regrid maps are embeddable, or shareable in read-only formats, but now, you can also publish a Regrid map to StoryMap. That's what you see above. Thanks to some deft and thoughtful work by Mike, you can select data and photography in Regrid that you want to be published, and your StoryMap will generate the selected content.