The project was a rather difficult affair that ended up being far easier than the process itself. I first started off by trying to use Chicago’s data itself, because I was already using their data for 1909-1919. However, it became apparent that the Chicago Police Department is not incredibly consistent with their record keeping. They did not publish annual crime data from 2011-2015, I would include that they did not publish the data for 2016, but it is included in the 2017 data publication. So, it became incredibly difficult to find a way follow up on what happened during this huge time span. I was nearly to the point of giving up and just accepting it, until I found out that the City of Chicago themselves publish the data. I was elated until I found out that neither the City of Chicago nor the Chicago Police department published race, ethnicity, or sex data for their homicide perpetrators. I was going to accept this and substitute arrest data, which does include race, ethnicity, and sex, until I ran into an FBI. This website publishes sex, race, ethnicity, provides graphs, easy to see totals, and an easy, one stop shop place for finding all the records I needed. The only difficult thing to find after that was Chicago census data, but that proved relatively easy to find in the end too.
I am very thankful with how plentiful much data is for the city of Chicago. The amount of studying that has gone into the city allowed for a far easier time in researching this material than I thought it would. Far easier than many thing I have had to research, especially for medieval work. I fully understand why you chose Chicago for us to research on and around.
I left the main website style in place because it was chosen for a specific reason. Firstly, I am not particularly skilled in any art design period, and the style is decently please, so I am naturally conservative in choosing something new. Secondly, the art style was chosen for a reason. I chose a white background and black text to act as a sort of black and white, like an old photograph, to show age, but chose a relatively modern look for the website to offset that.
