Map against violence: geoenabling a web initiative

Memonomena Peristatika is a website that sprouted as a reaction to a surge of police brutality incidences in Greece in early 2021. It was made to provide a central point of reference for video evidence recorded by victims and bystanders.

I contributed to this Next.js platform on Github by providing a webmap to visualize the long list of reported locations. Because the locations were collected in descriptive form in a spreadsheet, I adapted a Python script for batch geocoding of addresses using the Google Geocoding API by Shane Lynn. I added application-specific configuration globals for relevant spreadsheet column names, filters for the original entries csv (eg. approved), and region bias for geocoding. The script returns the incidences spreadsheet with location coordinates attached.

The map was provided as a react component with a dynamic wrapper to bypass server side rendering. On mount a Leaflet map instance is loaded with the default OpenStreetMap tiles, pulls the enities geojson and creates clustered markers with descriptive popups that link to the relevant video material. The component exposes props for styling its container and manipullating the map object once it is loaded. I added an optional Mapbox Light style which works on input of a valid API-key. The pull-request can be found here.