I had always thought there was something more than a little menacing about a stretch of the Garden State Parkway near where I live. Driving south past exit 138 or so, it has often felt to me that I was in a game of high-speed bumper cars with my fellow Jerseyians. Thanks to investigative work of one of the teams competing at Hack Jersey’s journo-coder hackathon this weekend, my intuition was quantified in a series of eye-opening bar charts.
Using accident data from the NJ Department of Transportation, three coders hacked away to come up with–what else?–but a data dashboard of Garden State driving mishaps called Crashdatanj. The team cleverly focused on accidents on our beloved Garden State Parkway to produce bar charts proving that the 10-mile stretch between exits 130 and 140 yielded an astonishing 800 accidents in 2012. The judges liked this hack as well. Crashdatanj ended up winning in the overall hack category, and the team was rewarded with the grand price, a visit to The NY Times’ R&D media lab.
The point of Hack Jersey’s hackathon, held at Montclair State University this past weekend, was to encourage a new kind of journalistic research–some call it Computer Assisted Reporting or CAR. Pairing student computer science majors,web designers, and IT type with journalists, the competition asked teams to develop data-driven stories. They succeeded. Several of the projects would no doubt improve the quality of the broadsheets I find myself reading.
NJ’s recent encounter with Sandy was the inspiration for several of the hacks. One of my favorites of that genre (and winner of Best Sandy hack) was Hacksandynj. Mining data from FEMA and state property records, this team explored the affects that lower property values and reduced tax revenues would have on the financial health of local towns and municipalities. Their ambitious hack involved a series of complex map overlays. Unfortunately, as was the case with more than a few teams, Hacksandynj experienced unexpected technical issues involving a key coder, so they couldn’t complete their overlay vision. It was a very worthy journo-hack, and I’m hoping this team will finish what they started.
Another group of students–known as Team Pancake–developed a site to allow MSU’s LGBT community to self-report harassment incidents and bias crime. Using their web site, victims can post anonymously and a separate back-end function allows a system admin to selectively approve and publish posts. Incidents are displayed visually on a map. Pretty good work for a weekend!
National public policy issues were taken up by a project called Because of Us. Based on zip codes, BoUs displays gun-related crime statistics along with state gun laws–open carry, concealed carry, etc. Both pro- and anti-gun forces then tweet their Senators with a link to this information. The inspiration for this hack was the overheated and fact-free cable television debates on Sandy Hook. It’s yet another valuable reality-based app that came out of this weekend’s hackathon, and it took the People’s Choice prize after a round of voting from attendees.
And it wouldn’t be a Jersey hackathon without a garbage-related app. Thankfully, the Talkin’ Trash project delivered the goods. We learned from them that Jersey has a proud history in garbage recycling: to wit, Woodbury was the first municipality in the country to set up a recycling program. I’ve never felt prouder of my state after hearing that factoid. Anyway, this team analyzed and displayed map data showing county-by-county recycling stats. Another interesting public policy fact we learned: the richer the county–I’m talking to you Hunterdon–the lower the recycing rate. In their presenation, there was some talk of tagging and tracking garbage as a check against overly optimistic claims of recycling by county executives. I strongly recommend that Talkin’ Trash review Eric Baczuk work at MIT’s Senseable City.
Final shout out to the The Cost of Radiology in NJ hack which involved scraping X-ray, CAT scan, and MRI pricing from medical web sites to give consumers some needed pricing data points. Since this was more app than journalistic story-telling–though there is a story here in the amazing pricing disparities–the judges wisely gave them … “Best App”.
This was a terrific and worthy hackathon, and I enjoyed the theme of data-based narration. The hackathon ended with a presentation from ProPublica’s Steve Englerberg and Jeff Larson, who really know how to use data to both tell stories and influence policy.
A big thanks to NJ News Commons’ Debbie Galant and Hack Jersey’s Tom Meagher for putting this hackathon together. Let’s hope they do it again next year.