BmoreTech highlights data-viz projects from SpotCrime, Sickweather, Shea Frederick

Monday night’s BmoreTech Meetup featured three data visualization experts out to share one message: seeing data points on a map can sometimes be a whole lot more valuable than staring at numbers in a spreadsheet.

Sort of the technologists’ equivalent of see the three, be the three.

At the Emerging Technology Center, SpotCrime founder Colin Drane, civic hacker-for-hire and Advertising.com employee Shea Frederick and Sickweather‘s Michael Belt each presented on their current data-viz projects. [Full disclosure: BmoreTech is organized by Technically Baltimore.]

• With SpotCrime.com, Drane has been mapping crime data for five years. “Everyone is incentivized to keep crime data away from everyone else,” he says, even though people seem to want crime statistics accessible: SpotCrime.com receives more than 800,000 unique hits per month.
• Frederick, who first mined Open Baltimore data on parking tickets to produce the SpotAgent app, combed through the city’s list of vacant houses and plotted their locations on a citywide map.
• Belt, one-third the team behind Sickweather, says their sickness-mapping site has mined more than 20 million Facebook and Twitter statuses for illness information people have shared.

Watch the video of Drane discussing SpotCrime:

Watch the video of Frederick talking Baltimore’s Open Data catalog: