March 30, 2017

This Is How Minorities Have Been Excluded From The American Dream

Recently, three teams from four universities, including University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab, College of Information Studies’ Digital Curation Innovation Center (DCIC), Virginia Tech, and Johns Hopkins University, used information gathered for the American Panorama project to create Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America. Essentially, the project maps out how neighborhoods, where minorities lived, were consistently excluded from the government investment that aided the United States during the Depression.

The project is described as follows:

“Mapping Inequalities updates the study of New Deal America, the federal government, housing, and inequality for the twenty-first century. It offers unprecedented online access to the national collection of “security maps” and area descriptions produced between 1935 and 1940 by one of the New Deal’s most important agencies, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation or HOLC.”

During the Depression, HOLC enlisted the help of mortgage lenders, developers, and real estate appraisers in roughly 250 cities to generate color-coded maps that rated the worthiness and liability of neighborhoods and metropolitan areas. The maps and collected notations were then used for creating the rules of real estate practice for almost a century. Since their initial creation, the maps have also provided the evidence needed for urban studies in the fields of economics, history, law, and sociology. Using the information gathered from the maps and accompanying documentation, Mapping Inequality exposes the relation between administrative culture, economics, racism, and the built environment.

Mapping Inequalities allows visitors to access various HOLC records, including more than 150 interactive maps and 5,000 specific region descriptions, that present Depression-era America from the perspective of developers, realtors, surveyors, and tax assessors. Looking at the maps, visitors can see how cities were divided by racial groups and environmental risks and how these separations led to past state actions (and inactions) and present-day American problems.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s and the New Deal, HOLC and the Federal Home Loan Bank Board were both instrumental when it came to home ownership protections and expansions, lending practice standardizations, and residential and commercial real estate investment stimulation. They would eventually work with public and private sector partners during the middle third of the twentieth century to generate millions of jobs and assist millions of Americans to buy or keep their homes. During this time, the federal housing programs increased the practice of racial and class segregation by establishing the idea that real estate speculation and environmental degradation would lead to America’s economic restoration and prosperity.

Scholars now describe HOLC’s property evaluations and risk management procedures, along with the practices of the Federal Housing Administration, Veterans Administration, and U.S. Housing Authority, as significant contributions to the continuation of racial segregation, intergenerational poverty, and enduring wealth gap between white Americans and minorities in the U.S. Mapping Inequalities provides visitors an idea of what housing policies were like in the New Deal era and how these guidelines have since affected the interaction between wealth and poverty in contemporary America.

Check out the project here.

Source: Visual News

March 29, 2017

2107 SXSW World Premiere of “Nobodies” Airs on TV Land

If you missed the SXSW world premiere of “Nobodies,” which took place at the ZACH Theater on Monday, March 13, you can now watch the first episode of the television series tonight at 10pm/9c on the TV Land network.

“Nobodies” stars and is executive produced and written by Groundlings alums Hugh Davidson, Larry Dorf and Rachel Ramras and revolves around the three as they try desperately to land one of their famous friends for a feature script that they have developed, so that they, too, can rise to fame in Hollywood.

Davidson, Dorf and Ramras have partnered with their real-life friends, Emmy® winner Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone, who executive produce “Nobodies” through their production company, On The Day, with Falcone directing and guest-starring in the pilot episode.

Get inspired by a multitude of diverse visionaries at SXSW – browse more 2017 Keynotes, Featured Sessions, Red Carpets, and Q&A’s on our YouTube Channel.

Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and SXSW News for the latest SXSW coverage, recaps, late-breaking announcements, and updates.

Photo courtesy of Michael Loccisano

The post 2107 SXSW World Premiere of “Nobodies” Airs on TV Land appeared first on SXSW.

Source: SxSW Film

March 29, 2017

A Look At Column Five’s Fresh And Delicious Deck Of Playing Cards

This article originally appeared on Column Five.

Each year, we gift our partners with a token of appreciation to honor the work we’ve done together. The gift is a reflection of a theme, value, or passion of ours. One year it was our coffee-based data visualization poster. Another year we turned an inspiring story about Ben Franklin into a fine-art print. This year, we wanted to give our partners something to chew on—figuratively.

As data visualization geeks, we consider ourselves bakers of delicious donut and pie charts. We knead our ideas, smooth out the kinks, sift through data, whip up copy, sprinkle in context, and serve up handcrafted charts that are nourishing for the mind and a treat for the eyes.

To pay homage to that work, we custom designed a fresh batch of playing cards, baked to perfection.

The deck was aesthetically inspired by our craft and symbolically inspired by a single word: flourish.

Flourish (verb): to be healthy and achieve success.

Flourish (noun): a decorative or finishing detail.

In the last year, we have flourished as an agency and as individuals. We grew our families. We honed our talents. We worked with more great partners on many creative projects. While 2016 was also a challenging year in many ways, we’re proud of what we achieved through persistence. We also hope to carry our successes on into this new year, so “flourish” felt like the appropriate theme.

FYI, the word “flourish” is also a nod to cardistry, which is the mesmerizing performance art of card flourishing (an impressive feat that is also the result of persistence). If you’ve never seen it in action before, check it out:

We’ve been itching to design a deck of cards for a while now, so our design team was happy to take the theme and run. (Shout-out to our friends at the Art of Play who helped us bring this dream to life.)

The pack features plenty of delicious details, from the packaging to the individual card design.

For us, this deck is a beautiful reminder of all we’ve accomplished and all we strive to do. We hope it inspires the same in you.

If you’d like your own pack, get ’em while they’re hot.

Want to see more of our passion projects? Take a look at the People For Periods interactive, which helps destigmatize menstruation, and the Popcorn Project, a brainstorming exercise we created with Girls Inc. of Orange County to empower anyone to achieve their goals.

Source: Visual News