Melbourne drawn from cafes

02-09-2016

Last year I stumbled upon this data visualisation by Ramiro Gómez that shows a map that emerges from plotting the location of pubs across Britain and Ireland:

I thought it was pretty cool how a map can just pop out from just plotting dots of real pub locations...

In terms of quantity, the equivalent of UK pubs in Melbourne would cafes, there seem to be one in every corner. So I asked myself, what would happen if I plotted the location of every cafe in Melbourne? would the map of the city emerge? can I tell something about the city just by looking at this map?

So I after doing some research to find a dataset of all cafes in Melbourne. The closest thing I found was the Melbourne Cafe Restaurant Bistro Seats dataset. That among other things, includes the name, number of seats and location of some cafes restaurans in Melbourne.

The image a the top of the page, is the result of plotting each location in the dataset (including things that aren't cafes) as a dot in gray scale color proportional to the number of seats of each business, darker dots mean more seats. However, I couldn't reproduce Ramiro's effect. The 3445 data points in this dataset are not enough for the map to really come to life. I need more data.

By moving away from the screen a bit you see something that can sort of looks like the Melbourne CBD?

Sort of? maybe?

I think I got the method right though, so I just need to find a data source that has more locations and also covers a bigger area.

If you know where to find better data about Melbourne cafes, would you please email me?

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