Visualizing West Seattle- Yelp Data

Project Plan

As a team, we met to discuss how we would tackle this large project. Our TA wrote the Yelp API script and we needed to edit it to pull West Seattle coffee shop data versus all Seattle business data. After we had a dataset, we needed to clean it to get rid of long reviews and drop businesses that were not in West Seattle (but classified as it). Once we had a workable dataset, one of my teammates and I wrote the code to create the radial dendrogram with reviews and logical nodes. I also created a map in QGIS of West Seattle and the resulting coffee shops.

Final Visualization

We looked at ratings, number of reviews, etc. to decide on the coffee shops chosen. We also included a map of West Seattle with the corresponding coffee shops represented alongside notable West Seattle parks and landmarks. I grew up in West Seattle and when I was making this map I was trying to show how unique each one of the different areas of West Seattle are despite it being one neighborhood. The Admiral area is very young and there are always bikers and runners on their way to Alki. So, I included Alki Beach and Hiawatha on the map since those are two places I know to be fitness hubs, and show the activity of the area. Plus, the associated coffee shop “Fit Bar” in North Admiral is known for its superfood coffee and acai bowls. West Seattle is also very green, there are a lot of parks and nature space. These green spaces ensure that there are always people walking around. It is easy to see the association between green spaces and coffee shops. This is because at every park I put on the map there is a shop in close proximity. At the West Seattle golf course the eyes flow from that point to Pearls immediately, which is the exact relationship I wanted to represent since this is a post-golfing spot. Also, as a West Seattlite I believe the reviews are accurate except for the highly-rated negative reviewer for Easy Street Records who said they “weren’t impressed.”