This is my final project for a Harvard University SEAS course, Visualization CS-171/64 (Spring 2012). The main goal of this project is to examine US foodborne illness outbreaks during 2008-2009. To accomplish this, a choropleth map is used to show outbreak location and severity (derived from num illnesses/100,000 people) with temporal filtering.
The original project scope included outbreaks from 1998-2009. However, after the project start date the CDC provided additional data regarding the reporting counties within each state, and the dates of first/last illness onset for outbreaks involving > 5 people. The project scope was revised to focus on the more granular outbreak data for the years 2008-2009.
This project uses Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Backbone.js, d3.js, jQuery UI, and the "Bootstrap, from Twitter" visual framework.
To set up this project, you will need to have git, Ruby 1.9 (and RubyGems) and the "bundler" gem installed.
Then, do the following basic setup:
git clone git@github.com:shanag/final-project-rails-cs64.git
bundle install
rake db:create db:migrate
Run the rake tasks to load the data (be patient, it takes a while):
rake load_cdc_data
rake load_geo_census_data
rake calculate_severity
Start the server:
rails s thin
Finally, go to http://localhost:3000.
Or, you can skip all this and just check out the Heroku app: http://floating-ocean-1736.herokuapp.com
The data for this visualization includes:
- foodborne outbreak data from the CDC
- FIPS county codes from the USDA
- intercensal population data for counties from the US Census Bureau
The foodborne outbreak data comes from two separate databases at the Center for Disease Control (CDC):
- EFORS (Electronic Foodborne Outbreak Reporting System) database, and
- NORS (National Outbreak Reporting) database
The data was provided by the CDC in response to a formal request that was made at the time of the project proposal. The data was delivered in multiple .xls workbooks, with several worksheets that needed to be reconciled. Each outbreak has a rootID which is used to label corresponding data points.
The following publication provided information about the domain topic, and guidelines for using outbreak data: http://www.who.int/foodsafety/publications/foodborne_disease/Section_4.pdf,