About the Project

I'm the kind of person who gets excited when they see a film permit taped to a lamppost, or when they recognize a familiar street in a movie. Building off my personal interests, I created this project in Spring 2021 as part of the Pratt Institute course INFO 664 Programming for Cultural Heritage. Given New York's prominence in pop culture, I wanted to investigate which parts of the city were most documented on film. I used Python to explore a dataset of film permits to answer this and related questions. You can access my code on GitHub to do your own analysis.

Next Steps

There is a lot more that could be explored with this dataset. Future work could include:

• More temporal analysis of permits

• Pulling in neighborhood names to correspond to zip codes

• Finding actual film information. The dataset does not include production names, just numeric identifiers. An ambitious project would be to scrape information from a site like On Location Vacations and try to match it to the city's data.

Notes on the Data

The dataset I worked with contains information on film permits from 2012 through early 2021, when I exported the CSV file from NYC Open Data. At the time, the file contained data on more than 68,700 permits. For my purposes, I looked specifically at permits with the EventType "Shooting Permit" and "DCAS Prep/Shoot/Wrap Permit," which covers permits on Department of Citywide Administrative Services property.

If you are interested in analyzing the data by zip code, please note that many individual permits correspond to multiple zip codes in the city's dataset. The Python code on my GitHub repo provides guidance on how you might deal with this messiness.

If you're interested in mapping the zip code data in Tableau, please note that a handful of zip codes did not automatically match to a longitude and latitude. These included 00083 (the unofficial zip code of Central Park) and 10048 (a zip code exclusive to the World Trade Center); I manually retrieved longitude and latitude information in these cases. I was unable to retrieve spatial information for the zip codes 10000, 10097, and 11038. Luckily, these only applied to a few permits and there were other zip codes associated with the permit in each case, so I omitted these specific zip codes from my map.

Credits

Data was retrieved from NYC Open Data's Film Permits dataset

Header photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash

Clapperboard icon by Pixel perfect from www.flaticon.com