Spring 2021 Graduate Course
NYU ITP
In the Fall of 2020 we were invited by Dan O’Sullivan, Associate Dean for Emerging Media at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, to create a course for the graduate students at ITP. This course would broaden the exploration of the unfolding pandemic data and invite graduate students to contribute to the COVID-19 Impact Project according to their skills and interests in emerging media.
Consistent with the pandemic era the course was held via Zoom. We were lucky enough have a diverse group of students from around the world. Here we share some of the students’ explorations of humanizing the pandemic data.
NYU ITP Spring 2021 and Spring 2022 Catalogue
The COVID-19 Impact Project – Extracting Stories from Data
Course Description
This course will use the open source COVID-19 Impact Dashboard as a base to explore ways to humanize the unfolding data on the pandemic. We will learn how data flows from public
github repositories and what tools are needed to visualize the data. We will review other COVID-19 dashboards to analyze what questions they are trying to answer and to compare and contrast them with our COVID-19 Impact Dashboard.
Using data visualization as a scaffold we will explore ways to support community-driven mourning and memorialization. Students can choose to participate as javascript coders, p5js explorers, UI/UX designers, citizen journalists, or data science explorers.
Sample Student Comments
There is a lot to cover and 3 weeks is tough. I appreciate the inspiration I got out of the course and look forward to incorporating it into my art practice! Thank you!
Student, Spring 2021 NYU ITP
I think that there is an opportunity to have this be a longer class. 3 weeks is tough for everyone when it comes to making a project and creating the content for it. I do feel that John Henry and Shindy did do a good job with the limited time we had. I think that having more clarity and direction into the objectives of the class would be helpful. I could imagine this being expanded into a larger class that would cover everything from how the project was built to creating new works with the data.
Student, Spring 2021 NYU ITP
All the information they [shared] was very interesting, they encourage you to be creative and make your project as the best as you can.
Student, Spring 2021 NYU ITP
“What aspects of this course were the most important or helpful to you?”
Going through different storytelling methods, seeing how making meaning out of raw data can affect human lives.
Student, Spring 2021 NYU ITP
COVID-19 Impact Project 