On Friday, March 6, members from the Futures Initiative team and the graduate Mapping the Futures course met with the NYPL Mapping Division and NYPL Labs for a behind-the-scenes look at some of the significant and innovative work they are doing with maps. Matt Knutzen showed us a number of maps from the NYPL collection, beginning with an antiquarian world map, and proceeding through maps from the NYC collection, including A plan of
Quality and Diversity Much has been written lately about the rise in quality of CUNY over the last two decades. Some have assumed that its rising quality means CUNY must have lost track of its honored populist commitments to New York City’s diverse population. That turns out not to be true, according to the careful demographic research published last week by Futures Initiative Fellow and Graduate Center doctoral student, Michael
This past October at our first public Futures Initiative event at the Graduate Center, Curtis Wong, the Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, gave a talk entitled “Mapping the Universe and Other Small Things.” In his talk, he mentioned a study from 1993 that asked children to a) point out Madagascar on a world map, and b) point out Yoshi’s Island in Super Mario World: As shown in his slide, there is a
Demos Orphanides, Webmaster and Online Community Strategist at HASTAC@Duke, recently joined the HASTAC@CUNY and Futures Initiative team for a few days while we prepare for several exciting new things on our horizon. Demos is the force behind the HASTAC.org website and it was great to work with him in person this past week. We are also pleased to be continuing to develop partnerships with faculty throughout the CUNY community and
