Inspiration
The Charley Project is an amazing website that tracks cold cases from around. While the website is incredibly in-depth, it does not have any visualization of all the cold cases.
What it does
We programmed a web scraper to collect key information from every case and plot it on an easy to read and interactive map.
How we built it
The entire project was done using python. We collected the data using the BeautifulSoup package, collected the coordinates using geopy, and plotted it using Plotly and Dash.
Challenges we ran into
Web scraping takes a long time! With over 13000 cases our inexperience showed as our code was not the most efficient. We also scraped more information than we could use during this weekend
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We both went into this inexperienced in Python and neither of us had ever web scraped before, so we're both proud of what we learned.
What we learned
We learned a lot about web scraping and the different packages that are involved.
What's next for The Charley Project Map
We have a lot of data we were not able to use in this short time but would love to implement in the future. We want to add the ability to click on a case and have all the information display in a sidebar. Additionally, because we plotted so many points, the map lags a little when moved.
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