BARThood is a project of News 21, funded by the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education. It was developed by five fellows at the University of California, Berkeley in the summer of 2009.
Wait – what’s a BARThood?
Where transit hubs meet neighborhoods, there is a story. Here in the Bay Area, we think of a “BARThood” as the neighborhood—the people, stores, parks, offices, and community resources—surrounding each Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station. Public transit provides convenience and mobility to urban and suburban communities, but transit is more than a way to get from one place to another. Where transit stations are planned, how they are built, and who they serve all have a significant impact on the surrounding community.
As regular BART riders ourselves, we know that impact is important. We set out to examine who BART is serving at each station by visualizing demographic data of ridership by station, aggregating content and news from each BARThood, and highlighting select BARThoods – Fruitvale, MacArthur, 16th St. Mission and Pittsburg/Bay Point – with multimedia reporting on individuals who know their BARThood best – people like you!
If you have a story to share about your BARThood, get in touch with us by leaving a comment. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook and delicious.
How we did it
In line with the goals of News21, we designed BARThood to be easily replicated by news teams reporting on public transportation and neighborhoods in other cities. All of our code is open-sourced. If you would like access to it, or more details on how we built our key features, please get in touch with us.
BARThood is a custom Wordpress site, making it easy to update and expand. Key features – including our data visualizations and timelines – were built in Flash and then integrated.
How we visualized the data
We started with the BART 2008 Station Profile Study, as well as the previous study conducted in 1998, both made public by BART. As we were most interested in how people from each neighborhood use their BART station, we chose to focus on the data for home-based ridership – that is, people commuting to BART from home, rather than from work or other places. We then selected the types of information we determined would reveal the most about a BARThood.
While the BART studies were full of interesting details, they were also dense and not particularly accessible to the average reader. To visualize that data in a more compelling, interactive way, we turned to Flash. Using Google Maps, we built snapshots of each station and its surrounding neighborhood. We then took advantage of FusionCharts, a highly customizable, xml-based Flash component, to generate custom animations for each type of data. While we could have generated this code ourselves, we decided that, considering our short, 10-week timeframe, it made more sense to customize the tools readily available and focus more of our energy on the user interface and reporting.
Finally, since we were curious how BART ridership demographics for each station compared to those of the surrounding neighborhood, we contacted Claritas, which generously compiled up-to-date demographic reports for our featured BARThoods. Specifically, we requested demographic information for either a .5-mile radius (MacArthur and 16th St. Mission) or 1-mile radius (Fruitvale and Pittsburg/Bay Point) around each station, depending on the size of the neighborhood and its proximity to other BART stations.
How we aggregated news and content
We used Yahoo Pipes to create five custom “chatter” feeds that aggregate relevant news, blogs, Tweets and Yelp reviews – one for BART in general, and one for each of our featured BARThoods: Fruitvale, MacArthur, 16th St. Mission and Pittsburg-Bay Point. Yahoo Pipes allows us to continually fine-tune these feeds (eliminating references to, say, Bart Simpson), as they arise. Future development plans include custom feeds for the remaining BARThoods.
We used Flickr to create custom galleries of user-generated media relevant to each BARThood. Any photo or video posted to Flickr under a Creative Commons license and tagged with “BART” and a specific station name is automatically added to these galleries, so they’ll stay fresh and constantly updated. If you’re interested in creating similar galleries for your site, it’s easy – do a keyword search on Flickr, pick the slideshow option from the results, customize the size, and then grab the embed code.
Finally, we wanted to make sure BARThood was useful as well as informative. We contacted the Metropolitan Transportation Commission about embedding their 511 Transit Trip Planner, and they allowed us to customize it to fit the BARThood design. If you have ideas for other useful BARThood features, let us know!
A little more about us
Andrea V. Brambila graduated from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism with an emphasis on multimedia. Her master’s project covered empty storefronts on San Francisco’s Mission Street. In 2008, she interned at The Sacramento Bee as a staff writer for the business, city, metro, regional and crime beats. Her coursework included Advanced Multimedia, Advanced Flash, Web Development, Multimedia for Photographers, and International Reporting: Burma and Thailand. After completing her bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Reed College in 2006, she went on to public radio internships at Oregon Public Broadcasting in Portland and KQED in San Francisco. Andrea’s BARThood is Downtown Berkeley.
Rhyen Coombs is a multimedia reporter and producer with a master’s degree from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her thesis “Foreclosed,” documenting items left behind in California foreclosures, received the 2009 Dorothea Lange Fellowship. Rhyen has produced multimedia for the Center for Investigative Reporting and The Chauncey Bailey Project, and leads social media workshops for the Knight Digital Media Center. Before attending Berkeley, she was an editor and developer for World Pulse in Portland, OR. Rhyen’s work has appeared in Bay Area publications, China Digital Times, AlterNet.org and NBC. Her BARThood is El Cerrito Plaza.
Marnette Federis is a multimedia journalist from California. She has reported for news publications in the Bay Area, San Diego and Washington D.C. Marnette has also produced multimedia pieces about service workers in Beijing, China and reported about the cultural practice of sending balikbayan box in Manila, Philippines. Her work has been published on Washingtonpost.com, Reuters, Roll Call and Voiceofsandiego.org. Marnette has a master’s degree from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and a B.A. in literature from UC San Diego. Marnette’s BARThood is 19th St. Oakland.
Kiran Goldman is a documentary filmmaker with a strong background in environmental science and engineering. She has helped produce international, environmental and health stories for Frontline/World and NBC-11, the Bay Area’s local NBC News station. Kiran holds a master’s degree in journalism and documentary filmmaking from the University of California at Berkeley. Her thesis film, “Fast As She Can,” about track and field runners in Jamaica, was awarded the 2009 Margaret and William Hearst Award for Excellence in Documentary Film. Kiran’s BARThood is MacArthur in Oakland.
Elizabeth Shemaria began her journalism career in 2005 after studying graphic design, art history and international law. In March 2008 she reported from Burma, interviewing artists and gallery owners about the struggle to sell art in a country with limited freedom of expression. Her travels have also taken her to Israel, The West Bank, Eastern and Western Europe. She has written for magazines and newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area and worked as an I.F. Stone Fellow at Human Rights Watch, producing multimedia content for their website during the summer of 2008. Elizabeth’s BARThood is North Berkeley.
Special Thanks
This project would not have been possible without help from BART, Claritas, the Data Lab at UC Berkeley’s library, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, Luna Salaver, Leigha Schmidt, Ray Raineri and Charity Wagner.
We would especially like to thank Paul Grabowicz, Richard Koci Hernandez, Susan Rasky, Jeremy Rue, Josh Williams and our editorial assistant Sara Johnson for their invaluable help and guidance.
In addition, we would like to thank the staff at North Gate Hall – Gayle Allerson, Roy Baril, Elizabeth Geno, Rob Gunnison, Mary Anne Glazar, Charles Harris, Julie Hirano, Michelle Kerr, Kean Sakata, Scot Hacker, Milt Wallace and, of course, Art Douglas.
