Week 3: Museums vs. Housing in NYC

This project seeks to find a correlation between number of Museums and Houses in New York City. I fed data from open source data repository Kaggle (Museums Dataset, Housing Dataset), into mapping tool kepler.gl, and created a 2-layer cluster map of Museums (denoted in Blue) and Housing (denoted in Red) placed on top of each other. Although the cluster maps may make it difficult to look at each individual data point, it clearly shows where housing and museums are each concentrated. 

Intuitively, one may think that the more housing, thus more people reside in a given area, the more the demand will be for art museums and other cultural centers. When looking at the cluster map, we can see that this is accurately reflected in Midtown & Downtown Manhattan: where there are bigger red clusters, there are bigger blue clusters. However, this correlation isn't seen everywhere — in Uptown Manhattan, there is a greater concentration in housing compared to Midtown, but there are not as many museums. Similarly, in Queens, while there is a high housing concentration, there are almost no museums. This suggests that there may be other underlying factors that influence where museums are situated other than housing, including dominant industries in that area and demographic differences. This may also be an indicator that housing may not necessarily correlate with the population that resides in an area. All in all, this data visualization gives an interesting outlook into how two social variables interact in real life.