a start …
Back in 2013, a friend and colleague came up with the name “Uncharted Singles” for a website we would potentially start to store a particular kind of project — projects with ideas that seemed too good to pass up, but generated outcomes that were too small to stand alone or be pursued long term. We were working through a hectic year and thus the small ideas stayed just what they were, unrealized.
Despite never having built a place for it, the list of these kinds of projects grew in our heads, and in the forms of drawings on napkins, ambiguously name desktop folders, and unmaintainable Github repos.
It is with this borrowed name that I am building a collection of one-off projects for the summer of 2021, to realize the ideas that have been percolating this last academic year. All the projects found here are short, visual, interactive, based on public data¹, and largely about New York City².
The most important thing they have in common though is that these visualizations are made to encourage a reader’s speculation on what public datasets really say about us, the institutions that produced them, and the world that makes use of them.
We start with the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index(SVI). In the past year, the SVI has been in frequent use for data driven projects that have attempted to predict the effects of the pandemic and propose solutions for the allocation of aid. We get into the nuts and bolts of the above definition by visualizing how “Social Vulnerability” is defined and what it looks like around us.
What is “social vulnerability”? Here is the CDC definition:
In our first map, we start by visualizing the established vulnerability scores of Census tracts in New York City. We then allow readers to decide which of the 15 vulnerability variables to include and exclude and see how changing the composition of our definition of vulnerability changes how the city looks through the lens of this data.
Next, we will use satellite imagery to show these vulnerable characteristics qualitatively. How do parts of the city differ in actuality even when they are deemed equality vulnerable by a metric? What does vulnerability look like in our city?
After the Social Vulnerability Index, our next dataset series will make use of administrative boundaries that mark our city. How are we dis/connected by the administrative infrastructures that govern us? We look at the overlapping geographic boundaries that divide New York City administratively, and visualize our shared school districts, police precincts, city councils, etc as links in the network that governs the city.
Hopefully by this fall our heads/desktops will be cleared, and our little ideas will be visualized and living out in the world.
¹Data from the Census, CDC, and nyc.gov
²while publishing code that allows expansion to other geographies
