asoback / refugees

OSU Hackathon Winter 2018 Project
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Visualizing the scale of the global refugee crisis

OSU Hackathon Winter 2018 Project

Andrew Soback

Tri Nguyen

Jose Garay Jr

Site demo available at https://refugeeproject.herokuapp.com/

Inspiration

One of our teammates realized they had some misconceptions about the global refugee crisis, and sought to learn more about. They discovered that the UN collects and provides a serious amount of data on the subject. They had been learning Python Pandas in order to learn machine learning, and working with this data seemed like a great way to practice.

What it does

The site is intended to walk readers through a map and list of conflicts and the resulting displaced populations

How we built it

We used Python Pandas to work with the data gathered from the UN site https://www.unhcr.org and turned it into a javascript array. Then we used Google Maps API to generate a map from the data, which served as the foundation of our website.

Challenges we ran into

Figuring out the scale of our project, how we could make something useful with our skills in the given time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We each learned new technologies during the event. We were able to take over 100k lines of data in a CSV file and transform it into a helpful visualization

Whats next for this project

Ideally, we want to try to address some myths and misconceptions about refugees and other migrants, and turn each into something small, that many readers on Reddit and other sites could spend 3 minutes or less looking at and have some views changed or worldview expanded.