Notes about Officer Involved Replica

Table of contents

Officer Involved is from The Intercept and was created by data artist Josh Begley, who has also created profiling.is - The visual vernacular of NYPD surveillance (more info) and Prison Map

Here's the site:

In row after row, we see photographs of corners, streets, suburbs, towns, all in daylight, almost all free of human presence. All these images—in spite of the mysterious lyric beauty of some of them—were captured indiscriminately by the all-seeing eye of Google, either with a bird’s eye view or at street level. They were then selected and set into an array by Begley. In one sense, they are the same as any other stills randomly pulled from Google Maps. But when we look at these photographs in particular, we are also seeing the last thing that some other human being saw. It is an immersion in the environment of someone’s last moments.

(emphasis added)

If it is true, as our ancestors always suspected, that the dead continue to exert some influence on the places where they lived and died, then Begley’s photographic project makes that insight manifest.

The components

The shooting data

Data from The Guardian's The Counted project – the zip file can be found here:

Here it is as a spreadsheet.

The imagery

Google Street View

Google Street View Image API Introduction

Google Street fancy promo page

What direction does the camera normally look at?

heading - indicates the compass heading of the camera. Accepted values are from 0 to 360 (both values indicating North, with 90 indicating East, and 180 South). If no heading is specified, a value will be calculated that directs the camera towards the specified location, from the point at which the closest photograph was taken.

Google Static Maps

Google Static Maps Image API Introduction

Basic URL
Adding a focus with center

Note that it's called center, not location – nnaming things consistently is hard, even within the same organization. But it's a reflection of the purpose of the API, too: the Street View can only inherently show one location at a time. A static map can show several points at once

https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/staticmap?size=400x400&center=Stanford,CA

Changing the maptype and view
Examples
Region code?

region (optional) defines the appropriate borders to display, based on geo-political sensitivities. Accepts a region code specified as a two-character ccTLD ('top-level domain') value.

Country-level domains can be found here

Here's the default view with a center around Vietnam:

http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/staticmap?&size=600x600&zoom=5&center=Vietnam

Notice anything different?

Another example: India

Steps for creation

1. Get the shootings data

2. Parse the shootings data for locations

3. Download and save map imagery

4. Create the webpage