Hi all,
As an educator & MLS student, I’m a big DH enthusiast, to the extent last semester I created, and am continuing to expand, a NYC-focused web project/site I thought other DH enthusiasts/students/educators/etc might be able to use… so I thought I’d send it along (am very interested, as both a teacher & as someone studying librarianship, in utilizing NYC as an ongoing research topic). The site is:
http://www.investigatenyc.com/
The site had its birth as a project for library school (MLS program at Queens College), and was also something I conceived of as a teacher. I teach first-year writing at Queensborough, within which I typically include several NYC-focused units, and I wanted to create one site from which students … or anyone, actually … might (easily) look up various kinds of information (& in some cases make maps & charts) about their own neighborhoods & buildings.
*Anyway,* from the site, you can look up all kinds of things about your (or any) NYC neighborhood, like air quality, 311 calls, environmental hazards, crime rates, STD & communicable disease rates, median income, poverty rates, rat inspection history, death trends, drinking habits, current & upcoming capital projects, demographics & demographic change, what districts you live in, and who your elected officials are (and what they do). You can also find information about your own, or any, building, including a pic of it taken in the 80s, the year it was built, who lived in it in 1940, who owns it, and if an LLC owns it, who’s in charge of the LLC. Also, I actually found the listing for James Baldwin & family in the 1940 census, and have a screenshot up of that…
So anyway. If anyone could use this as an educator, for personal interest or for any other reason, am passing it along!
(I apologize if anyone’s already seen this — I posted the site in the digital humanities group within CUNY commons spring semester. Since then I’ve expanded the site, and will continue to expand — you can now look up any nearby superfunds, brownfields, and toxic release & hazardous waste sites, for example, as well as the locations of nearby “green infrastructure” projects, and more…)
Cheers!
–Sharon
slintz@qcc.cuny.edu
& P.S. If anyone has an idea as to what I might include on the site, please feel free to pass it along! 🙂
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