we have always been global
We have always been global was an interactive database of the word’s global cities.
I built this as my final project at an intensive Javascript-focused web development course.
Using the Google Chrome Experiment as a template, I combined my groint love of open data with a 3D rendering of the planet in order to create an interactive visualization (my first ever!). I was learning web development at a time when we thought data was going to change how we told stories, and thereby the peoples and societies those stories were about.
In many ways, the open data movement (which began in the late ~2000s) preceded the early days of data journalism, as countless government datasets were put online for journalists to analyse for the first time.
When I made this project, I was definitely aware of the scales that big data enabled, and I was really interested in rendering that complexity in more interesting ways. A few years previous, I had worked for a sociologist named Saskia Sassen at Columbia, who’s work had focused on <a href=”https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jc93q”Global Cities</a>, and increasingly, the extractions and expulsions that take place in their wake.
In this interactive project, users are told to write a city of choice, marked by a red point on the globe:
Once given a city, the page loads information onto the page, including population data, sunrise/sunset times, and recent news/social media updates scraped from local new platforms and other sources.
This project was the first project that my growing interest in data visualisation and data journalism with
This Github repository hosts the project code.