College and Culture

Name: Trenton J. Johnson

Number of Teammates Desired: 1 or 2

Description of Idea: Some of the more interesting visualizations are ones that mashup multiple domains of seemingly orthogonal data and try to find a correlation. This idea simply takes all of the accredited universities in the United States and maps those on a map along with the geographical settings of popular television shows, movies, and novels in selectable years. A user could use a slider to move to a particular year. A map would then show the geographical setting of a particular form of media. If the user selects books, it would show where the all the popular books are located in a concentration-shaded manner. The app would then overlay the population information of each institution for the selected year somehow on the map. Maybe there is a correleation. Maybe there isn't. If there is some sort of correlation, then this app could certainly give insight into which regions of the United States have college-goers who were more influenced by popular media than others. It will also show which media affects which regions. This app could also show the reverse - if entertainment writers chose to set a movie/show/novel in a place based on college populations.

This idea needs refining, but I think it has the germ of something useful.

Description of Data: The Department of Education has a updated list of all the accredited institutions, with their addresses. These addressed need to be geocoded to longitude and latitude though. In preparation for HW5, I wrote a script that used Google's Geocoding API to do the geocoding for all these institutions. To get population information for the over the years, I'll have to use another resource. Settings for TV shows and novels and movies may be more difficult to find in a compiled type of format, but it shouldn't be too difficult to find the settings for a limited number of top novels/movies/shows for each year.

Additional Information: Anyone interested in entertainment media will find this study interesting.