Ahh, graffiti. Some people loathe it, some people appreciate its streetwise aesthetic. Whether you appreciate the urban art form or not, the MIT Media Lab has put together a truly impressive specimen of digital interaction using open-sourced data from the City of Boston to pinpoint where graffiti has been reported throughout all of Boston’s neighborhoods.
As part of the Media Lab’s You Are Here mapping project, the technological cartographers charted every reported instance of graffiti in the past year (you can play with the map right here). It’s important to note that they can’t “tell us the collective stories behind the writings on our city walls but it can portray where people use graffiti as as medium for communication and memory.”
With that in mind, realize that this isn’t every piece of graffiti or street art in the city. Rather, it portrays the ones that people felt compelled, for one reason or another, to report to the Mayor’s 24-hour hotline.
The map allows you to see the most reported neighborhood graffiti incidents by each month when once the ‘play animation’ button is engaged. The red dots indicate that a specific tag was reported over three or more different months.
Once the animation reel rolls, you’ll notice some interesting patterns emerge. For example, in the height of summer, August, just before is back in session and students descend upon the city in droves, there’s a large spike in graffiti reporting in Allston – a densely populated student neighborhood.
Interestingly, Jamaica Plain saw a spike of reported graffiti in July while East Boston was subjected to a higher volume in October.
Dorchester led the way in May and June but the number of reported incidents in Boston’s largest neighborhood paled in comparison to the aforementioned. Overall, Dorchester had the most reports in 2013 with 457.
For its part, the Media Lab think’s there’s something deeply philosophical afoot. They write, “The tagging of places suggests a distinct need we have as humans to put our mark on the world. The reporting of them suggests a separate need of business owners to not have their property painted on. We might find that addressing this first need will help to address the second.”
But what do you think? Drop your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below.
