Beyond the Blue Dot
Subtitle: A Storytelling Platform for Humanizing Urban Data
By: Tola Oniyangi
Publisher: [publisher not identified]
Published: 2020
Place of publication: [New York, N.Y.?]
Language: eng
Description: his capstone project proposes a novel approach to crafting narratives from existing place-based data. By combining elements of creative storytelling with traditional quantitative data, the project provides an avenue for poetism in the urban research process. To this end, the project is a web-based visualization tool for exploring the city at the human scale that stems from the idea that empathy can arise from “walking a mile in a person’s shoes.” This project introduces empathy into urban research through a replicable methodology for generating location-based synthetic narratives from existing large-scale data, such as census data. It fills a void in understanding the people who inhabit a location by describing them through stories from their own perspectives. Its central hypothesis is that you can better understand a place by engaging with narratives of its inhabitants. With this platform, I am proposing a humanistic counterpoint to the current dominant paradigm of top-down modernist urban analysis and research that pervades through urban planning and design.
Notes: Department: Urban Planning.

Thesis advisor: Anthony Vanky.

Thesis (M.S.)--Columbia University, 2020.