Boundaries of boston neighbourhoods survey

[Zamfir]

Even though I have nothing with Boston in particular, I still thought this rather interesting:
http://bostonography.com/2012/crowdsourced-neighborhood-boundaries-part-one-consensus/
It's a project where they ask many people to draw the boundaries of neighbourhoods. It's intruigng to see the pattern of areas that people strongly associate with a specific neighboorhood, and the more fuzzy areas in between.

[cpt]

Very cool. It's interesting that there are neighbourhoods that have no portions of >75% agreement.

[broken_escalator]

Also the few areas that had a small hole inside the >75% section is interesting.

[Tirian]

If you have an interest in fuzzy geography, you can lose a weekend at http://www.commoncensus.org/index.php. It looks like they haven't updated their maps in nearly two years, but it's a really cool survey that set out to establish the boundaries between, say, Greater Austin and Greater San Antonio and Greater Houston and similarly across the entire country. It'd be really cool if Randall could do a tribute strip for this site and maybe prod him into recalculating for the past ten thousand votes and give him another thirty thousand new data points.

[Djehutynakht]

I happen to be an East Bostonian (one of the two geographically isolated areas of the city), so I am not unfortunately included in this (although I'll be honest, even within these neighborhoods themselves we divide them into sub-neighborhoods. I can think of at least four or five in East Boston alone).

Notice all of that white space which they haven't designated as neighborhoods in the middle there... what is all that? I honestly have no idea. I don't know much of that end of the city due to my geographical isolation.

But yeah... and another thing too is that this is decently accurate. Except for when there's a significant barrier (such as a huge highway or a body of water, per say), the neighborhoods tend to diffuse into each other rather than be staunchly seperate.

[gmalivuk]

Notice all of that white space which they haven't designated as neighborhoods in the middle there... what is all that?

Looks like Franklin Park and some cemeteries.

[Djehutynakht]

Notice all of that white space which they haven't designated as neighborhoods in the middle there... what is all that?

Looks like Franklin Park and some cemeteries.

All of that? Dear lord, we don't have those kinds of wide open spaces on this side of the Harbor.

Except the airport, of course. But they shoot at you.

[gmalivuk]

All of that? Dear lord

Pretty much.

[The EGE]

I'm really interested to see where they go from here. I've lived in Boston for a year and I'm still sorting out the neighborhoods.

It's rather interesting to see what creates holes between the traditional neighborhoods. BU, Northeastern, and the Colleges of the Fenway have all mostly eliminated their home areas, although they weren't necessarily much in the way of neighborhoods in the first place. Much of BU, for example, was auto dealerships until the 30s.

[ivnja]

If you have an interest in fuzzy geography, you can lose a weekend at http://www.commoncensus.org/index.php. It looks like they haven't updated their maps in nearly two years, but it's a really cool survey that set out to establish the boundaries between, say, Greater Austin and Greater San Antonio and Greater Houston and similarly across the entire country. It'd be really cool if Randall could do a tribute strip for this site and maybe prod him into recalculating for the past ten thousand votes and give him another thirty thousand new data points.

I'm looking at my own state (Maine) in this right now, and we're weird. Our largest city, Portland (the southern of the two dots), has a region of influence - but the city isn't in it. Our capital, Augusta (which doesn't have a dot), is probably the biggest city that actually falls into the Portland region. The Bangor region is fine, I'm not surprised by any of the territory that falls into that. But then there's a random large chunk of what I'm pretty sure is largely timberland that inexplicably skips both Bangor and Portland to ally with Boston.

Low population densities do strange things to surveys.


edit: missing word

[Tirian]

If you have an interest in fuzzy geography, you can lose a weekend at http://www.commoncensus.org/index.php. It looks like they haven't updated their maps in nearly two years, but it's a really cool survey that set out to establish the boundaries between, say, Greater Austin and Greater San Antonio and Greater Houston and similarly across the entire country. It'd be really cool if Randall could do a tribute strip for this site and maybe prod him into recalculating for the past ten thousand votes and give him another thirty thousand new data points.

I'm looking at my own state (Maine) in this right now, and we're weird. Our largest city, Portland (the southern of the two dots), has a region of influence - but the isn't in it. Our capital, Augusta (which doesn't have a dot), is probably the biggest city that actually falls into the Portland region. The Bangor region is fine, I'm not surprised by any of the territory that falls into that. But then there's a random large chunk of what I'm pretty sure is largely timberland that inexplicably skips both Bangor and Portland to ally with Boston.

Low population densities do strange things to surveys.

And if you think Maine is weird, look at Wyoming. According to the survey, nobody in Wyoming describes themselves as a resident of a city in Wyoming. Of course, I suppose that might be true.

I agree that this would be more dependable if there were more data points. But it does seem like an interesting statistical problem to draw the fuzzy boundary around our greater metropolitan areas, and if I can talk an extra ten thousand people into filling out the form then maybe we'll get closer to being there.

[Telchar]

Billings, MT where I live is the fourth largest city of influence on their, dwarfed only by Denver, Salt Lake, and Minneapolis/St Paul. That's probably due to the size of Billings (only city of 100,000+ in MT, ND, and WY) and the large swaths of extremely unpopulated rural landscape for miles around.

[The EGE]

The survey got posted on the Globe's online front page. That should get it a lot of new results.