Menu Money

The Menu Money project collects and analyzes Chicago datasets—specifically 311 service call data—alongside web-scraped data on aldermanic expenditures from the “Menu” program, organized by district. GIS data on Menu program expenditures has been extracted from the “Menu” program dataset. Data on aldermen and their tenure has been scraped from Wikipedia. In addition to aldermanic and Menu program data, 311 call records have been extracted from the Chicago Data Portal. The project aims to better understand the relationship between Menu program expenditures and 311 service calls, while also exploring whether these expenditures address constituents’ concerns about their community, and provides data visualization to illustrate these insights.