When I was at this talk, I was amazed by what was yet another example of how advanced technology is being put to practical use. This website is very useful in not only finding demographics and data information on multitudinous statistics of New York City’s population based on race, neighborhood and income, among many other criteria. What amazed me was how such large heaps of information have been gathered, collected, and meticulously organized into one website for any layperson to peruse through to their heart’s content. The information is available for both the average person as well as a professional and it can be used in a variety of ways. I found this plasticity to be quite alluring and immediately realized its potential for our own project, as we will be performing this sort of research for our documentary of our respective neighborhoods. Like some of my classmates noted, I also didn’t like the color schemes, but at the same time, I realize that with so many divisions and different categories, it is hard to differentiate, because there are only so many colors in our visible spectrum, anyway. If there were one thing I’d change about this site, however, it would be to maybe differentiate the colors more, or find different, more visually perceptible ways of presenting the data. For now, however, the color schemes work wonderfully because they do a good job at getting the message across, in terms of showing large trends of change over large spans of area and time.

– Nadera Rahman

-Social Explorer is an online research tool that provides easy access to demographic information and census data. I feel that this website will be very helpful for the research that the groups will be conducting on their chosen neighborhoods. For example, the website allows one to customize, save, and export the maps and data to a variety programs like Microsoft Excel or Microsoft PowerPoint that can be used for presentations. For my assignment neighborhood project, I would be able to look at the maps of Chinatown and the racial composition of the area. I can then save a map of the data and later use it for the video presentation.
-I enjoy that this tool is very user-friendly because most other programs are difficult to navigate through. In addition, Social Explorer provides very detailed information; not only can you look at the racial composition of different areas, but you can also view the differences in areas based on gender, divorce rates, and income.

Unfortunately I was unable to attend the Social Explorer talk with Sydney Beveridge due to a previous engagement, however I took a look at the NY Times article provided as well as the website itself. What I find most interesting is the way that the wide range of data is able to be produced and displayed on each of the maps. Also I am a very visual person, so I think being able to see the data laid out like that rather than written out or simply in a table makes it more interesting and more accesible to a wide range of people. I think this is especially important when writing news articles or doing reports to a larger audience who can see and will be able to interpret faster than if it were simply using words.

The Social Explorer presentation gave us insights into how we can use the website.  It may be helpful to use the website to look at maps of the area we are going to explore.  You can even look for specific areas or addresses, which will also be helpful in our project.  We can then go to those areas or addresses to explore further.  You can also puts these maps into a slideshow form to scroll through multiple maps.

The website is also useful because you can input specific factors you want to explore about the area, including income, race, and religion.  In some cases you can even put more than one of these aspects on the same graph in order to compare more easily.  In the presentation we also saw the use of circles to show data, in this case it was election data.  It was interesting to see how you could manipulate the maps in this and other ways.

Comments:

-I know that the ACS survey provides a smaller sample than the census. However, does this mean that only a select few households fill out the ACS form? If so how does the selection process work? Does every other person in a neighborhood receive the ACS form? Does one household per block receive the survey to fill out? If so, wouldn’t the selection method for who fills out the survey compromise the accuracy of the data?

-Beyond the fact that not everyone receives the American community survey, how often does the survey get sent out for citizens to fill out? Is it sent out as frequent as the census? What is the return rate as far as how many people return the survey filled out? If people don’t return the survey, do more people get the survey to fill out considering the sample is already relatively small? Wouldn’t a lack of returned forms make the results inadequate? Why isn’t the ACS distributed to a larger population of people like the census is?

-Yet, although the ACS is based on a smaller sample, I believe its more detailed data will serve as a valuable commodity when researching a respective neighborhood. The ACS survey data encompasses a lot more divisions among a population than the common census form that everyone is suppose to fill out. For example, instead of just race and population in a given area, the ACS data provides information regarding education level, income and rent amongst other things.

-The Social Explorer Program seems to only enhance the data from the ACS survey through interactive maps. I believe the maps on the Social Explorer Program can really be used to quantify visually the field notes from a respective neighborhood in regards to the racial makeup, political landscape and economic power. The more visuals there are in a project, the more appealing the project will be.

– The maps generated by the Social Explorer site provide users with a visual component alongside the data accessed.  The availability of data tables to accompany the images qualifies this data, and allows for visual analysis of the given statistics to facilitate the study of particular geographic areas (in our case, Manhattan Chinatown).  This site is a valuable resource for understanding and quantifying the information we will collect for our neighborhood documentary project.

– The Social Explorer program certainly seems to put the “demo” in demographics.  Its interactive, user-friendly interface allows students to explore – on their own – immigration patterns in relation to gender, age, class, and race.  The ability for users to save the information retrieved from the Social Explorer site to Microsoft Powerpoint or Excel draws attention to the well-planned nature of the program.  I am also impressed by the amount of detail contained in the maps generated by the site.  In testing it out, I was even able to find my own block!  Perhaps we can use the Social Explorer program to map out blocks for our Chinatown project.

– What type of repository stores this information?  Is there a way to perform checks on these statistics to ensure their accuracy?  How do the developers of this interface monitor and update their database?