Social Explorer's Roots in NSF-Funded Project

This "Discovery" highlight published by the National Science Foundation on March 27, 2014, documented the remarkable trajectory of Social Explorer – the demographic mapping tool developed by Andy with support from over $2.2 million in NSF grants spanning fifteen years of research.

Written by Elizabeth Boatman for the NSF, the piece traces Social Explorer from its origins as a modest classroom teaching tool at Queens College to its adoption by hundreds of thousands of undergraduates, K-12 students, and members of the general public, and ultimately to its selection by the U.S. Census Bureau as the platform underlying Census Explorer, a free public tool that drew more than 70,000 users in its first week alone.

For those who knew Andy's work, the document offers a fitting measure of his impact: a project he began simply because he wanted freshman students to be able to "see" demographic data grew into a nationally significant tool for data literacy and civic understanding.