Data Days: MLK

To go with our new name & new website, Data Circles has come up with some new ideas for engaging with our community. Among these ideas is to celebrate some of our favorite days of the year with our favorite subject—data. To kick off #datadays 2020, we'll share a mini data science project in honor of MLK day.

Martin Luther King Jr. led great strides for civil rights in America, and it would be impossible to quantify his impact. I decided to work on a mini data science project to celebrate MLK day. I thought of plenty of relevant datasets related to civil rights and diversity, but I didn't think I could do these topics justice in a mere weekend. Driving in South Seattle last week, however, led me to a much more manageable data topic—American street names honoring MLK.

I used data from OpenAddresses to get a collection of American street names. OpenAddresses is an open source database of worldwide addresses that relies on volunteers and donations to gather data. As a result, it isn’t a complete dataset. They are actively adding new areas, but in the meantime, there may be many missing examples of streets named after MLK. Further, the available data is not evenly distributed across different states, so don’t draw any conclusions about each state’s relative devotion to MLK! Check out my project repo for a step by step guide.

Plotly Map of MLK Streets

Keep in mind the dataset has large areas of missing information. See image below for data coverage.

Coverage of Data from OpenAdresses

A legend is not provided, so I can’t explain the meaning of the different shades of green. By comparing the two plots, I suspect the lighter shade indicates partial coverage.