Title — Visualizing Voices: A lens into water quality concerns in the Central Valley, CA

Collaborators — Olivia Hoang, Sean Furuta

Overview: California has extreme water quality problems, both within very wealthy and disadvantaged areas, that many people do not know about; water-related discussions have mostly been focused on the recent drought. This project focuses on creating a platform for individual voices, of people who do not have clean water in their communities, to be amplified. This project points out places where the government is not sampling/not sampling enough and also brings in the human dimension, through its focus on the voices of the people involved.

Problem — There are assumed gaps in California’s government's water quality database, how do we identify them?

Solution — See whether online water quality concerns made by locals and non-profits that represent the local community match what the government’s database shows.

Method — Web scrapping to create a database of water quality concerns mentioned in California, spatial match with governmental database, create online visualization of results and access to data.

So far/next steps — We ended up identifying some serious gaps through scraping blog posts from the Community Water Center, whose mission it is to assist disadvantaged communities in the Central Valley facing water pollution, but have yet to better our scraper, create cleaner visualizations, and expand our search to social media platforms.