Project Proposal

For my project in COMS BC 3997, I plan to design a website that allows users to see how 311 service requests in NYC changed over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, spanning from March 2020 to the end of 2022.

Why is this important?

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, New York City has been one of the hardest-hit cities in America. Since the beginning of the pandemic, at least 1 in 187 city residents have died of COVID-19, with a total of 44, 765 reported deaths, according to the New York Times. In the beginning of the pandemic, the city especially faced periods of high stress with the virus reaching an exponential growth rate and field hospitals being set up citywide.

Although deaths in NYC never again reached that spring 2020 peak, the city’s landscape and social order was drastically shifted during the pandemic years. Subway ridership plummeted, outdoor dining cropped up, and many residents left in-person work to spend their days on Zoom screens inside small city apartments—at least, those who didn’t leave the city. City regulations made for a much stricter environment here than in most of America. I have a theory that as New Yorkers’ control was temporarily taken from them, they had to take small measures to control the one thing in their presence: their homes and neighborhoods.

Goals and Objectives

My goal is to create a site to view and analyze service requests over the course of the pandemics. I want to have an interactive page where people can explore a map of service requests across the city on any given day and filter by type of request, district, time of day, etc. This will be a more exploratory look at how these requests changed over time.

Next, I want to have a page where I’ll post results of data analysis I plan to conduct (exact tests and hypotheses, but I think they will largely focus on changes in service requests based on landmark moments during the pandemic).

Finally, I want to have a history section on this website to establish key periods during the pandemic (deadliest months, different variants, social changes, government regulations, etc). This will give visitors some context into what it was like living in New York City during the pandemic! I’ve personally been here since September 2020, and it’s been a pretty wild ride.

Method

Timeline

Performing background research on history of pandemic in NYC
Design hypotheses for data analysis section
Perform data analysis on dataset and conduct statistical tests
Create history page
Create data analysis page and writeup
Build interactive page to explore the dataset

Budget Shouldn’t need any—I’ll be using a public dataset along with R for my data analysis and hopefully the 311 API for the interactive map.

Resources

Past Examples

This project will be similar to my COMS 4995: Empirical Methods and Data Science final project, so I’ll be drawing on that experience for the scientific method, statistical tests, and write-up styles. It will have the added component of the website, so I plan to draw on my background web design/development for that, and hopefully API calls will take care of the rest.