Alex Austin
EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING
Above: My students working during a field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
As an art educator and librarian, I often think about the importance of place in education. Interacting with art in person, for instance, gives students an entirely different experience of the work than viewing it on screens. Field trips to cultural institutions are key for providing students with memorable and meaningful learning experiences. For some students, field trips constitute the only visits they will make to certain institutions, as their families don’t or can’t take them.
Having worked as a public school teacher, I chaperoned and coordinated a number of field trips. One of the most important factors that determine whether a field trip is financially or temporally feasible is the destination’s proximity to the school. In this lab, I have mapped cultural institutions in NYC in relation to the city’s school districts. Through this map, we can begin (1) to form a picture of which districts have the best access to these institutions, and (2) to see which types of cultural institutions are most equitably dispersed throughout the city.
GETTING THERE
There are a number of factors that contribute to accessibility for field trips. Aside from the cost of admission that some institutions require, there is the cost of transportation, which in some cases may greatly exceed the cost of admission. Suburban schools will require rented buses, which are expensive and their bookings fill quickly. Urban schools may require subway fare for field trips; this option is less expensive than rented busing, but NYC subways are notoriously physically inaccessible for those with unique mobility needs.
Whatever the method of transportation, one must build in plenty of extra travel time for traffic or transit delays. Because students may rely on school buses for after school transportation, school groups need to make sure they will definitely get back to the school before the end of the school day. Time is a key factor for the feasibility of field trips, and distance is directly correlated to it.
DESIGN INSPIRATION
I was inspired by a previous student’s work, which documented firework complaints to 311 during the pandemic. This student created an animation that looked like fireworks going off in real time. I felt that the dark background and bright points on the map were design elements I wanted to emulate.
MATERIALS
Through OpenDataNYC, I found geographic datasets for school districts, museums, galleries, libraries, and subway lines and downloaded them as GeoJSON files. I uploaded these files to the mapping visualization website CARTO.
METHODS / PROCESS
CARTO had just released a new version of the software, which seemed buggy and hard to navigate. If I made more than ~5-10 adjustments to my map or zoomed in more than ~5 times, the map would disappear, and I would have to reload the page. Upon reloading the page, my most recent work would be lost and all of the layers of data would randomly switch order, which made the map very difficult to read. I could not find any features that would allow me to run stats on my map to analyze specifically how many museums landed within specific school zones and so on, so I had to rely on eyeballing the map to analyze its contents.
In order to distinguish between the layers of data, I chose to rely on color and saturation to communicate distinctions between the groups. I made a black background and laid in the school district shapes over that. I raised the transparency of the district shapes, so that the black background would desaturate their color. I then chose bright, saturated colors for the for the museum, gallery, and library data points that I laid in over the district shapes, because saturated colors pop against desaturated colors. I spent a long time choosing the colors for these three data point groups, and settled on red for museums, mid-tone cool pink for galleries, and a yellowy off-white for libraries, because these three colors are far enough apart in both hue and value that they seemed they should be fairly colorblind-safe. I had to manually adjust the colors of the district shapes so that they would have enough contrast with the dots above them. I chose a randomized color palette for these shapes rather than a monochromatic one, because I didn’t want a shift in the monochromatic value to incorrectly indicate that the value was reflecting some sort of data characteristic, such as size or density; each district is independent from all of the others, and I wanted the color to reflect that. I then realized that CARTO had only 20 distinct colors for the 30+ districts, so I had to add more color categories and choose the hex codes manually.
After looking at my map for a while, I realized that the picture of access that I was trying to illustrate was incomplete without including the main form on transportation in the city, so I found a geographic dataset showing the NYC subway system on OpenDataNYC and added that to the map in a bright lime green.
RESULTS AND INTERPRETATION
The resulting map shows that School District 2, which runs from the upper east side down to the financial district encompasses the most galleries and museums, in total number and in density. The further out one travels from this center, galleries, museums become increasingly spaced out. School District 2 also has the tightest knit web of subway stations, making transportation to and from museums feasible.
Certainly it makes sense that many museums are located near each other. Tourists can make the trip to multiple museums in one day if they are located near one another. For school field trips, there is usually not enough time in the day to visit more than one museum, so the proximity of these institutions to each other does not benefit schools in this situation.
Of three groups of cultural institutions, libraries are clearly the most equitably dispersed as far as location. The light yellow dots that represent libraries are spaced out the most evenly throughout the city.
Depending on the library, the learning-related value of a school trip there may vary greatly. The main branch of the NYPL in the Stephen A. Schwarzman building hosts the Treasures Exhibit, but other local branches provide valuable services to the community that may not be traditionally field trip-worthy for the school day. However, outside of school students are probably more likely to visit public libraries often than museums and galleries. So, it’s probably best to consider libraries as valuable destinations for students outside of the parameters of the field trip.
REFLECTION
The addition of the subway lines to my map was an afterthought, but in retrospect it strikes me as the most import aspect of the map. The inequitable distribution of subway lines between Manhattan and the outer boroughs underscores that the Manhattan schools, especially in District 2 have a much easier commute, and thus much better access, to these cultural institutions.
I probably would not use CARTO again until they have worked out all of the bugs in their new version and until I work at an institution that has a licensing agreement with them. My two week free trial of CARTO is up, so I don’t have much of a choice, but after this experience, I don’t feel that it’s a huge loss.