After attending Sydney Beveridge’s talk, I learned how to use the website application Social Explorer. This web application is extremely pertinent to our seminar class because it allows us to directly see the change in the demographics of an area over time. By using Social Explorer, one can observe a multitude of factors in almost all districts/counties across the United States. Some of these factors include the age, race, median income, and unemployment of any district or area. Social Explorer is also extremely useful because it allows the user look at the specific factors/demographics of an area. For example, instead of just looking at the overall income of an area, one can look at the income versus race (i.e. the Asian median household income).

Social Explorer has already been extremely useful as it helped Ryan, Indiana, and me identify the demographics of the Avenue U/Homecrest communities. As a result, we were able to go to Homecrest and speak with members of the Asian community who were affected by Hurricane Sandy. Without access to Social Explorer, we probably would have had an extremely difficult time in deciding which areas of the Homecrest community to focus on for our documentary.