Nearing the End

Post date: Dec 12, 2012 6:7:50 PM

Dec 8, 2012

Our final days in Venice are upon us; I really can’t believe that next week will be our last. As this deadline approaches, however, there is still much to do. We have spent many tireless hours rigorously inputting our collected data into our spreadsheet, but finally we've got it all in and ready for our analysis. There are many things to look at and show from our data, so we have had our work cut out for us.

To start, we divided up our data by sestiere, the way we collected it, and compared what we collected this year to what was collected in previous years. We first looked at whether each store went from open to closed or vice versa and also if there was no change in the type of store. We also marked if a store had changed from one type to another. To analyze the change, we grouped the types of stores into 5 categories: predominantly tourist, somewhat tourist, mix of tourists and residents, somewhat resident, and predominantly resident. To simplify this analysis we combined some of the categories in order to end up with just tourists, mix, and residents. In doing this, we were now able to see the kind of changes happening in the retail sector of Venice. The most important changes we looked at were resident to tourist, tourist to resident, mix to tourist, and mix to resident.

We also had data for population density by census track in Venice, but to make more sense of things we looked at the density by island instead, so that it was easier to see which parts of the city were more residential. With this information along with knowing where the different types of stores are predominating or closing, we can see how the two factors are related and how they affect one another. Above, you can see that, for example, there are more food stores present in the more densely populated areas. This is very intuitive because, of course, where there are locals there will be more stores to cater to them.

Another thing we were able to see was the density of stores in each sestiere. We found that San Marco was most store-dense, closely followed by San Polo, which is not surprising, given that they are largely tourist areas. It is interesting though because they are much smaller sections of the city compared to, say, Castello or Cannaregio, which were significantly less dense despite their larger area.

It has been really great to see our project come to fruition and have concrete results to work with. Now the next step is to put it all together for our final presentation and report next week!