development
Seattle Crime Rate is an interactive web application that informs users about crime rate data in Seattle. There are several interactive graphs and a map of locations where crimes have occurred. This web application is built entirely from R and leverages the Seattle Police Department Police Report Incident dataset.
Our target audience are users currently living in Seattle or are planning to move to Seattle. Through our web application, our users will be able to learn about increases or decreases in crime over time, the most common types of crime, and the areas and locations in Seattle with the highest crime rates.
Our web application uses Shiny which is an R package that helps in building interactive web applications straight from R. R is a programming language built for statistical computing and graphics. Our team extracted data from the Seattle Police Department Police Report Incident dataset and conducted several techniques of data wrangling to create various types of visualizations. We leveraged three different R packages to us build our visualizations including Plotly, ggplot2, and Leaflet. I was in charge of creating a map visualization that plots each crime report on a map of Seattle along with the type of crime committed. The map uses marker clusters that automatically groups large number of markers on a map together as users zoom out. The marker clusters are also color coded to help users easily identify areas with larger rates of crime.
Our team hosted our code on our GitHub repository allowing for multiple team members to work on the same files at the same time. This helped us manage and track changes made to our web application code. To deploy our web application, I used shinyapps.io that allowed for a secure and scalable deployment.
This project was my first experience working in a team to successfully build a live web application. It was also my first experience using a version control software to collaborate on code. Coding the interactive map and deploying the web application gave me the foundation for teaching myself new tools and the ability to troubleshoot various issues. Once our project was completed, we presented our web application in a project fair where attendees interacted with our features. We received numerous praises for how intuitive and seamless our web application functioned.