The Center for Social Movements and Innovation (CSMI), an institute housed within the Milano School of Policy, Management and Environment at the New School, was hoping to make sense of the people, organizations, events, courses and centers/labs in its database. The information was kept in a spreadsheet format, and the goal was to 1) display the information in a more exploratory format for discovery and 2) use insights to drive visualizations on the most interesting intersections present within its database. To derive the relationships most important to CSMI, I advised the team first on how to "tag" people, organizations, events, courses and centers/labs by cross-relational keywords important to CSMI to track.
First I visualized all their data by the five tags we decided to track across CSMI's database: Place, Race, Gender, Movements and Innovation. This visual playground provided the capability to see the shape and "population" of each thematic area significant to CSMI's work.
Once the client interacted with the visual playground, we decided to move forward with 7 especially striking intersections across its database spanning people, courses and centers/labs. These 7 intersections were: 1) Movements & Innovation, 2) Race & Movements, 3) Race/Place/Gender & Innovation, 4) Movements by Theme = Stratification, 5) Movement by Theme = Migration, 6) Movement by Theme = Environment and 7) Movement by Theme = Technology.
The client requested static visualizations that would be easily shareable through PowerPoint. The final 7 visualizations provided a small multiple method to digest the insights across the 7 intersections of value to CSMI.
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