Introduction
According to US News, 42% of Penn's students live off campus. Even so, Penn's off campus website is not the best nor the easiest tool to use to secure off campus housings that suits its students. In fact many students, such as myself, want to move off campus to avoid the increasing prices and inconveniences (such as lack of kitchens and closing during winter and summer breaks) of on campus housing, but due to many factors, such as crime rates around potential off campus housings and distance from classes, these students often opt to stay in campus dorms.
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With that said, the rest of this website contains several interactive visualizations that may aid a potential off campus mover in her search for housing.
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Data Sources
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The bulk of this data was obtained by web-scraping UPENN's Off Campus Housing website.
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Note. An official PennKey is required to access the site.​
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Values for longitude and latitude were added via Geocode Cells, an add-on for Google Spreadsheet.
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​Distances from Jon M. Huntsman Hall and Steinberg Dietrich Hall were added in Google Spreadsheet using this Google Apps Script.
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The file was cleaned up using OpenRefine.
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The data was provided by the Philadelphia Police Department.
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The raw data set containing data from 2005 can be found at the bottom of this website.​
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Because the file was too big for Microsoft Excel 2016 to handle, Mac OS X Terminal was used to split the .csv file.​​
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Instructions on how to do this can be found here.​
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The ​​file was cleaned up using OpenRefine.
Hello and welcome to my website! My name is Zhi Yang Lin and I am a senior majoring in Mathematical Economics at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). This website was created as a project for OIDD 215: Analytics and Digital Economy.
For questions and concerns, please email linzy@sas.upenn.edu