Communication Commons^™

What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?: Visualizing Extreme Wealth, William Mahoney Luckman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The word “billion” is a mathematical abstraction related to “big,” but it is difficult to understand the vast difference in value between one million and one billion; even harder to understand the vast difference in purchasing power between one billion dollars, and the average U.S. yearly income. Perhaps most difficult to conceive of is what that purchasing power and huge mass of capital translates to in terms of power. This project blends design, text, facts, and figures into an interactive narrative website that helps the user better understand their position in relation to extreme wealth: https://whatdoesonebilliondollarslooklike.website/

The site incorporates …

Why, New York City? Gauging The Quality Of Life Through The Thoughts Of Tweeters, Sheryl Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As a resource for social data, Twitter’s platform has been used to measure the quality of life through sentiment analysis. This capstone project explores another methodological technique—querying Twitter data around specific keyword terms to determine dominant topics, word patterns, and sentiment leanings in a geographical area. Focusing on New York City and Los Angeles for comparative analysis, the keyword term “why” will be used to build a Python analysis around topic modeling and sentiment analysis. Using this approach, the analysis reveals social and cultural differences, the overall sentiment of tweets, and subjects of interest to tweeters.

GitHub Repository for all …

Disrepair, Displacement And Distress: Finding Housing Stories Through Data Visualizations, Jennifer Cheng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While the COVID-19 pandemic is at its forefront a health crisis, it also triggered an upheaval in the already dire housing situation endured by many New York City renters. Tenant fears of rent increases, deferred maintenance, and displacement certainly worsened during the pandemic. But the housing crisis is, at the same time, part of a perpetual real estate cycle contingent on speculation and the symbiotic relationship of landlords, investors, and lenders in pursuit of profit – to the detriment of tenants.

Following years of lending deregulation, funding cuts, and tax reform, the financialization of housing emerged. Real estate speculation, where …

Slices Of The Big Apple: A Visual Explanation And Analysis Of The New York City Budget, Joanne Ramadani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As a component of government, budgets are fundamental not only to improving the quality of a shared society, but also to understanding what our government officials consider to be their priorities. However, most budgets can be difficult to understand, using terms that are not familiar to people who have not studied finance or economics. To that end, Slices of the Big Apple is an interactive, centralized narrative website that uses visualizations at its core in order to: 1) facilitate a holistic understanding of the New York City government budget for NYC residents; and 2) conduct a five-year analysis of Community …