Obama | One People: Data Analysis and Visualizations

The MIT SENSEable City Lab has unveiled a new project that visualized and analyzed the mobile phone call activity that characterize the crowd Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day. Led by Andrea Vaccari, this work aims at answering the questions: Who was in Washington, D.C. for President Obama’s Inauguration Day? When did they arrive, where did they go, and how long did they stay? The data analyzed consists of hourly counts of mobile phone calls served in Washington, D.C. and includes the origin of the phones involved in the calls. To ensure the complete privacy of the mobile customers.

Besides the dazzling visualizations of Washington DC and the World developed by Mauro Martino, the early findings of the data analysis confirm and quantify the popular impressions. For instance, examining the relative increase in call activity by state reveals some unexpected results. In absolute terms, the most represented states were, unsurprisingly, the most populous: California, Florida, New York, and Texas. In relative terms, the states with the strongest increase were the southern states of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee, with calls up to twelve times the normal levels. These are states that played a prominent role in the Civil Rights movement and notably are also so-called red states whose voting population went for the Republican candidate, John McCain. Other states with a ten-fold increase in call activity were Illinois, Barack Obama’s home state, and Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, swing states which went blue, voting for President Obama. Most interestingly, comparing these results with U.S. demographic statistics shows that the percentage of African Americans in each U.S. state is a predominant factor determining increase in call activity and therefore participation in the event, which instead was not necessarily influenced by the state’s proximity to Washington, D.C. or its political leaning.

The City joins the mobile call data with a map of Washington D.C. to produce a stirring visualization. The areas around the Mall and Pennsylvania Avenue, where most inaugural activities took place, are highlighted on the map with 3-D building models colored in yellow. In the center of the screen, the map of Washington, D.C. is overlaid with a 3-D color-coded animated surface of square tiles (1 tile represents an area of 150 x 150 meters). Each tile rises and turns red as call activity increases and likewise drops and turns yellow as activity decreases. On the left, a bar chart breaks down the call activity by showing the normalized contributions of calls from the 50 states and 138 foreign countries grouped by continent. The timeline at the bottom illustrates the overall trend of call activity in the city during the week of the Presidential Inauguration.

Similarly, the analyses on call activity in the days before and after January 20 also reveal that the Inauguration was a multi-day event as mobile phone traffic increased markedly throughout the week. The hotspots of activity were clustered in the Northwest neighborhoods of the city, around Downtown, Adams Morgan and U Street.

Relation to my thesis: While these results confirm the popular impressions, they are yet another example on the potential to quantify and compare the presence of people in different areas of the city and to unveil their dynamic movements through time (where people come from compared to a regular day, the Inauguration was a multi-day event). A next step in this kind of research process would be to better link the findings of the data analysis with the visualizations.