Social Explorer is an excellent tool for those studying demographics and those who are doing research involving neighborhood demographics. It uses data collected by the Census Bureau every decade. Different maps can be created using this tool, sorting areas by age, race, gender, income, etc. The information provided allows for a visual sense of the changes taking place in specific areas over a long period of time. Social Explorer is important for making it easier for people to see and understand what changes have taken place in the world around them.

Sydney Beveridge’s presentation on Social Explorer gave some great insight into how the website could be used to supplement the Peopling Of New York seminar class. The demos that were displayed showed that the web tool can be used to sort census data in any way conceivable. Demographic data including age, sex, income, and ethnicity can be featured on the map at anytime. Perhaps the most exciting feature of Social Explorer is that it has old census data from when such information had begun to be collected. This allows us to see the progression of areas. New York is a truly dynamic city in terms of demographics, and Social Explorer helps us understand the changes that take place.

Social explorer is a very dynamic, very useful research tool that allows users to create maps and slideshows using a multitude of census data all the way from 1790. Maps can be created based on population, age, sex, race, income, occupation, unemployment, marital status, housing, education, and more. These maps will come in handy when creating our documentaries because it allows us to see where certain ethnic groups are concentrated in our neighborhoods. It is very interesting to see how internal migration has occurred and progressed through the years and to see what ethnic groups live in what neighborhood and how this compares to the set up years before.

Sydney Beverdige’s talk about Social Explorer was an extremely interesting one. In her talk she showed us how to use the program, which had a bunch of different features and categories in which we can use to look at maps. The maps could have been by income, or race, or religion, and more, which I thought was an extremely useful tool in scoping out where the best places to go to when we visit our neighborhoods are. I tried using the website after the talk, and found it extremely simple to use. It is a straightforward and quick tool that will help the class with their neighborhood exploration projects.

I was unable to attend the Social Explorer talk because I had chemistry lab during that time, but I managed to look at the map on the NY Times website. The information is accessible and easy to use and understand, making it enjoyable to tamper with. The various amounts of data make it possible to learn surprising things about population demographics. Social Explorer also provides useful information such as gender, racial composition, and income of different areas. It must have been a gigantic feat to have gathered and organized all the data for this program. This program makes viewing information about an area much easier than looking at lists and numbers because it is easier to make connections when looking at an image with different colors. 

Okay, so don’t judge me, but I love maps. They give us the ability to take something that is literally larger-than-life and give it shape, make it tangible. In a very basic way, they connect us to the whole world over. And on a very basic level, I just think they’re so visually striking.

So, yes, even before playing around with Social Explorer I was already a bit biased towards this sort of tool.

What I really like about it is that there are so many options that you could never really get bored. Want to know the average income of a town in Arkansas? How many females are there in Alaska? Social Explorer is an easy way to find the answers.
Social Explorer was an indispensable tool while I was doing my archival research. With it, I was able to see, block by block, how many Chinese immigrants were living in the Homecrest area, helping to direct my group’s efforts towards one zone and not another. Furthermore, because it compiles information from the US Census and the American Community Survey, there are no shortages of data to help verify my results.
My only complaint? America is cool and all, but what about the rest of the world? Obviously I realize that to compile as much information on every country in the world as SocialExplorer has managed to do for the United States is a huge undertaking, but I still think that even some basic, preliminary information (income, race, sex, etc.) would allow for interesting over-arching comparisons between the countries of the world.

Sydney Beveridge’s demonstration of the Social Explorer web-app was very helpful. Not only does the Social Explorer assist users in finding out the population density of certain races in different regions of America, it also helps in determining other factors like the average age group, the average household income, or population of males/females in a given area. It, in other words, outlines the demographics of the USA in a simple to use website.

I feel that this application can be very helpful in our Brooklyn group project, which requires us to find out how Hurricane Sandy effected the Chinese population in Brooklyn. With this app, my group and I need not to get off every train stop to observe the demographics of the area ourselves, but can pinpoint the locations with high densities of Asians and preemptively plan out how to conduct our project research.

This application can also prove useful to us in the future when determining where to buy a house or where to go if we want to conduct research on another specific group of people.

I thoroughly found the presentation of the Social Explorer website to be very fascinating. I think it will be a beneficial resource for our research on our respective China towns as well as the final documentary we will be filming. I’ve never seen such a website where you can access the demographics of any neighborhood in the country throughout the years. You can literally save pictures and record the statistically-based demographics and characteristics of any specific neighborhood or general region. You can use this resource to find out details such as the dominant race in a specific region, and could can even correlate this to other traits such as religion. I think the true beauty of this website is the ability to use this tool to study a specific area over time and then compare that to the history of the area in accordance to the time period and observe any correlations. This will help us specifically with our research and ultimately with our final project this semester because it will provide us with the opportunity to deepen our understanding of our respective communities and help us make connections that wouldn’t have been possible beforehand. The information we can acquire from this website will help to make our documentaries more thorough.

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.

Sydney Beveridge’s presentation on Social Explorer was quite eye opening for me. Never before have I seen a site focused solely on demographics and different regions, and in such depth. I think her presentation overall was very clear and to the point, demonstrating all the various uses of the site and how to use them to accomplish different things. One thing that I found very interesting was the fact that you could type in an exact street and see all the demographics around that area not only at the current moment but also dating back to many years ago. This is very useful in showing how demographics have shifted over time in that area.

I think this site will be very useful in our class since we too focus on demographics in different parts of New York City. We will definitely be using it in our research on Chinatown but it will also be a tool I will remember about and use in the future with any project involving demographics.

After hearing Sydney Beveridge’s  demonstration of Social Explorer, I feel a lot more comfortable exploring this tool. I felt she did a good job explaining how to navigate the site in context to our project. She paid special attention to the racial breakdown of New York neighborhoods. I found it particularly interesting when she brought up the religious breakdowns and went so far as to locate all the houses of worship. This could be very useful in gaining information about our neighborhoods because religion often plays a huge community role. Knowing where churches are located could help in field work since they are community gathering centers as well as cultural hubs. Also, the sheer amount and variety of congregations in the five boroughs was astonishing, especially when compared to the entire US and Social explorer offers a powerful visual to prove this.

Social Explorer will be useful for research purposes to determine where exactly in our neighborhood we should focus. It can also provide us with longitudinal statistics that may be useful when determining how our neighborhoods came to their current ethnic breakdown. Additionally, snapshots from the site can be used in the documentaries as visual aides.

Sydney Beveridge introduced us to the potential benefits of using the program Social Explorer. The maps are informative and helped us envision ways to present our facts for our documentary. The program allows you to look into at general larger areas (like the country) or a specific area (like Chinatown NYC) in terms of economic status, religion, race, etc.  Her demonstration of the progression of a certain variable in a specific area throughout time was a great idea. She showed race changes in the New York City area. Her saved maps ranged from 1950s to the 2010s.  When viewing them from the beginning to the end, the color changes represented the increased population of Asian Americans.

The maps can be easily manipulated to show any data that you desire to show. My only question would be how to incorporate these interactive maps in our film. They are great ways to show the different classes of people in our neighborhood and how Hurricane Sandy affected each of these groups of people. We have already begun to use the maps for preliminary research in order to better convey the situation in the film but some of them could be potentially helpful for our final product as well.