Th_s Lan_ Is Yo_r L_nd

"Th_s Lan_ Is Yo_r L_nd" is a data art piece about children living in poverty in the United States. It is a web-based interactive choropleth map, encouraging users to explore child poverty statistics from the Census Bureau's Small Area Income & Poverty Estimate data for US counties in 2012. Interaction with the map adjusts playback of the popular US folk song "This Land Is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie, intermittently muting playback of the song proportionally to the percentage of children living in poverty in that county. We are very sensitive to errors in sound, perceiving them with an immediacy that visual or abstract communication do not usually carry.

I remember first hearing "This Land Is Your Land" in an elementary school music class. I was probably about six years old at the time, living in a county where currently more than one out of four children grow up in poverty. I've always loved the song. In working out the idea for this piece, I sought to communicate how many of the children in the wealthiest nation in the world are systematically excluded from our nation's opportunities and prosperity.

Karl Ward <karl@ghostghost.net>

I'm a master's candidate at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Email me. We could talk about all sorts of things.