New York changed for me when...

General Description "New York changed for me when..." is a map and timeline that captures the moment when New Yorkers remember a shift or change in their city.

These moments are either personal (memory) or collective (history).

Personal stories are submitted by users, and include these metadata:

- Month and year
- A short description of the moment
- Optional photo
- Whether the change was for better, worse, or neutral

- Race of user
- Gender of user
- How long the user has lived in New York

History stories are pulled from the WNYC archives.

When many individuals submit stories to a common point on the map, and in the same timeframe, these stories come together to indicate collective moments of change as well. 911, for example, would likely be both a historical and memory event, with points from both WNYC and the audience.

Technical Aspects: We used free and open source tools, including:

- Google Maps;
- Google Forms and the Google Spreadsheets APIs to collect and organize user submissions;
- the D3 visualization library to build our interactive timeline;
- and WNYC’s own open source Tabletop.js library to interact with the Google Spreadsheets API

We also envision integrating the platform with our Django-based CMS in order to automatically integrate WNYC stories about the changing city as soon they’re published on our website.

Design: Visitors come to the site/app either via the WNYC homepage, ads, or links from external sites.

They see the map, timeline, a prompt to add their pin to the map, and a menu from which to filter the stories, or pins on the map.

The map would show all the pins from every contributor whose moments of change occurred within the last five years. Clicking on any of these pins would open a flyout with the individual story.

If they drag a pin to the map, a form appears that collects their story details, and details about themselves (see General Description).

Clicking on a year, or several years, in the timeline would highlight those years and show only pins for those years.

The checkboxes in the menu allow visitors to toggle on and off stories from certain groups of people, or certain types of stories. For instance, they can choose to view stories only from hispanic females who have been in New York for over 10 years. They can view stories which viewed changes as for better, worse, or neutral.

The visitor can also choose to view only stories from WNYC.

Editorial Aspects: It’s almost a cliche that New York is a city always changing. Mayors and movie stars come and go, and so do corner shops and restaurants.

At WNYC, we have nearly 90 years of stories documenting the city’s changes both subtle and profound, and we know from comments and radio call-ins that our listeners have their own memories of how New York, and their own personal New Yorks, have changed.

This tool will let our listeners discover WNYC stories from a new perspective, finding them by time and geography, and will let them add their own stories of change in a way that feels more personal than a website comment. Listener-submitted stories will also be able to guide us in future reporting about this ever-changing city.

Planning: The "New York changed" map and timeline would require these following resources:

- A few editors/moderators to moderate stories submitted by users
- Either editorial curation, or automating the inclusion of WNYC stories into the map
- A team of a couple developers and a designer to make this site/app mobile-accessible

This project could potentially develop into a more robust platform that quickly builds data-driven "profiles" based on user-submitted stories. Views of a changing New York can be more coherent and quickly accessible once we've gathered over 200 stories.

Team Members: Steven Melendez, journalist/developer; Schuyler Duveen, developer; Louise Ma, designer