What’s big in DC’s creative community? Kickstarter stats tell the tale

What type of creative work is thriving in D.C.? Depending on where you spend time, you might have vastly different answers to this question. But what about using Kickstarter campaigns as an indicator?
Polygraph, the NYC-based publication dedicated to “visually driven essays” decided, with a little help and impetus from Kickstarter itself, to do just this. Given the data on 100,000 Kickstarter projects, Polygraph broke down the data by type of project and city. This allows some insight into what category of projects are relatively more or less popular in each major U.S. city.

So @kickstarter emailed us about a collab. So we made a thing with all of their data, ever: https://t.co/TCV4Rm70Pn pic.twitter.com/jDS0f5oeSX

— Polygraph (@polygraphing) September 15, 2016

So what’d they find? In D.C., journalism-related projects are relatively more popular than in the rest of the U.S. A full 2 percent of the city’s 952 projects were devoted to journalism — double that of the U.S. average (1 percent).
The essay also looks at how D.C.’s projects compare to each other in terms of type as well as size (number of backers). This yields a pretty cool visualization:

In the Polygraph essay you can hover over each small circle for more information on the project it represents. The range of colors shows a relatively creatively diverse Kickstarter ecosystem in D.C., contrasted with a city like Nashville, for example, where a full 80 percent of projects are music-related.
We think this concept for understanding creativity in cities is pretty cool — go explore more deeply here.