Visualizing Networks in Boston Data

This network represents the routes provided by the RunKeeper app. The nodes represent the 26 neighborhoods in the city of Boston, sized by population and the color coded according to the number of routes originating from the neighborhood (blue is low and red is high).

This network was particularly challenging to build due to the different projections of the data. Shapefiles of the Boston neighborhoods are in a Lambert conformal conic projection, and the data from the RunKeeper app was provided in WGS84 Mercator projection.

This network representation reveals that there are three neighborhoods in Boston that do not use the application to track their running routes. Additionally, there are some heavily populated areas of the city that are terminal nodes in the network.