With this dataset, my aim was to try to pinpoint where the centralized area of certain markets were inside the confines of San Francisco. The thought process is that brokers for a certain type of business would located in a central area for that business, rather than a central area of the city. Splitting it up by groupings of brokers should give us general neighborhoods of where each market took place. This hopefully would answer any questions about where markets were located in the city.
In terms of visualization, I think the best would be a map with colored points based on which type of broker the location is so you can really see where these places were located and it might give you some clues as to where the production or sale of these goods took place.
The beauty, and shortcoming of this data is that there isn’t a ton of it for each. It’s nice because in theory the location of the brokers already aggregates the location of the markets, therefore finding where a handful of brokers are would reduce the work of searching for hundreds of, say, grain suppliers. The issue is that there aren’t many brokers for certain categories and so that might not be an accurate assumption/theory to act on.
For this data set I took it directly out of the 1907 San Francisco phonebook, cleaned up all the information to fit it into a spreadsheet, then plugged it into the GPS Visualizer using Bing Maps. Very easy to work through.
Bibliography
Crocker-Langley San Francisco Directory 1907. San Francisco: H.S. Crocker, 1907. Internet Archive. Web. 23 Sept. 2016.
“GPS Visualizer’s Address Locator.” GPS Visualizer’s Easy Batch Geocoder: Convert Addresses to Coordinates. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Sept. 2016.
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