We’ve been researching the CUNY student experience for a while now, and have collected an enormous amount of data: interviews with students and faculty (subsequently transformed into transcripts and coded), student photographs and drawings, and geocoded map locations. And for years we have wanted to find some way to showcase the visual data, and especially the photographs taken by and drawings done by CUNY students in 2009-2011. If you’ve seen us present or looked through our slide decks you’ve seen some of these images. They are AMAZING, full of detail and nuance and movement and challenges and triumphs, and we are so grateful that students shared them with us during our research.

We are thrilled to share our new website, Finding Places, Making Spaces. This website presents selected visual data from our research with CUNY students in 2009-2011 at BMCC, Bronx Community College, Brooklyn College, City College, Hunter College, and City Tech. Students sketched maps of their daily routes, photographed items related to their academic lives, and drew representations of their research processes.

These visualizations augment our publications on this research, and provide an alternate way to learn about what we learned from CUNY students. We’ve included photographs that students took of places and technology, drawings that students made of their process when completing a research assignment, and timelines created with maps that students drew of the activities of a typical school day. All are accompanied by quotes from student interviews, to contextualize the images in students’ own words.

Please take a look at https://ushep.net/. We’d love to hear what you think.