I decided to explore the Living New Deal and reverse engineer the features and data that it offers. Living New Deal is a website on which you can look at different infrastructure projects that have been recorded in years dating as far back as the 1920s. The Living New Deal serves to create a massive, crowdsourced digital archive and interactive map documenting New Deal public work and art, making it accessible to the public. The project reveals the legacy of public infrastructure still in use today and acts as a proven model of modern economic recovery and development.
This is the Lincoln Tunnel project from New York to New Jersey. Built by the Public Works Administration from 1934-1938
The Living New Deal entry on the Lincoln Tunnel elaborates on a variety of historical and technical resources, such as government records. The description has records from the Public Works Administration, engineering plans, costs, and descriptions of construction phases throughout the project. These sources provide a justified and detailed retelling of the tunnel’s development, being labeled “Very good” on its information quality by the website.
To change these raw materials and experiences into a digital humanities project, the developers of Living New Deal tried to explain their data with culture and human understanding/experience. Historical data about the Lincoln Tunnel was researched and verified for a concise narrative that fits within the broader New Deal infrastructure program. The website can categorize the tunnel as a ‘site type’ of project, allowing users to compare it to other projects under the same tag/category.
The Lincoln Tunnel is presented on the website as a searchable map-based posting. The map contains hundreds of other projects that can be explored through the click of a button. This leaves an impression on the user considering the amount of detail that goes into almost every single project on the map. Living New Deal focuses on providing clear and understandable data for the reader without having to crunch through countless numbers. While also getting a sense of geographical and visual representation of what the data actually means.
-Daniel Lugo