Hi Chris,
Thanks for your feedback. It is great to hear your comments and your take on my project. I wanted to respond to you, but am not sure how this will reach you.
I hope it does, eventually
1.
"The data being ethnicity of restaurant vs geographic area, bigger blobs equals more of that type of restuarant, and the largest blobs include all types of restaurant in each area. Please let me know if I've got this wrong."
Partly correct, the blobs are sized according to the amount of restaurants in that area for that ethnicity. Eg. CBD blobs are usually quite big and they sometimes intrude into say Parnell and Newmarket blobs. However the blobs on each page refer to one ethnicity so all Chinese foods are on one page, if layered on top of Italian, one can quickly see where the Italian and Chinese restaurants are, geographically. However, your comments show a good understanding of the project so maybe your comment I just highlighted is just a mis-wording (can't seem to find the right word!)
2.
"Could you have used another layer of information (like colour) to help differentiate the different data sets? "
I originally did use different colours but when I started overlapping them, it was hard to differentiate between the ethnicities and aesthetically, it looked really messy. By putting them all in one colour, it limited the amount of layers one could compare and made the act of layering more important since the person would have to remember what they are placing down and there is a constant flipping to compare a layer on the top with a layer closer to the bottom.
3."There is a question of scale here too, as smaller text would mean that the blobs wouldn't necessarily intersect, so perhaps its a curiousity of the mapping itself rather than the city."
True that the text size and the length of restaurant names have a impact on whether the blobs intersect or not, however, the concentration of restaurants in a particular area (CBD, Parnell, Newmarket) should graphically show a difference compared to a cluster in other areas (Takapuna). Not all areas are equal and I hope that I have balanced it graphically to show that.
4.
"It seems the insights from your mapping haven't realised their full potential in re-mapping our understanding of the city. Another axis or layer of information might help. What happened to your proposal to compare auckland's restaurant diversity with cultural diversity? "
If I had the time, I would have tried to find out the geographic, ethnic breakdown of the Auckland area. The Census only has a break down between large ethnic groups ie. European/Asian/Pacific Islander. My mapping breaks it down further to Italian, Chinese, Mexican. This detailed data for population is harder to find, but I agree, would have added an interesting comparison to the ethnic restaurants.
Cheers
Lyannie
