Fear and Luminescence on a New York Bike Trail
Background
This project was done for Lede's mapping class taught by Aaron Reiss. The assignment was to physically collect data by walking around, noting an observation, and building a story from that observation. Just the weekend before this project was assigned, my parents and I had gotten into a heated argument about how I was "inviting problems upon myself" by bicycling late at night. I initially chose this topic as a way to use data to demonstrate to my parents that they had nothing to worry about. I planned to bike down the path, videotape the entire trip with the camera directed down the path, and then utilize the light reflected on the ground as a measure to depict the journey. But something about this ride was different.
Collecting data about light on the route made me aware that I was afraid during parts of this ride. These reactions were not new, but because they were focused at the beginning of the journey, I realized that I would just conveniently forget by the conclusion of the ride that I was ever afraid. This exercise in gathering light data inadvertently compelled me to gather data on my fears and the reasons behind these feelings.
Tools Used
I tracked my bike ride on Strava and exported the .gpx file from the app into geojson.io to collect the JSON data. I then uploaded this data into Mapbox to create a map. I used Adobe Photoshop to create a feathering effect to focus the map on the location I was concerned about. I used Adobe Illustrator to create gradients and mark up the map and used Scrollama.js to create a scrolly-telling webpage.