Multimedia Research Contest awards go to student projects on poverty, refugee crisis

NCSU Libraries honored the student winners of its second annual Multimedia Research Contest, sponsored by Gale Cengage Learning. Created to inspire new and engaging ways to communicate information through visualizations, animations, games, and more, the contest is open to all undergraduate and Masters-level students across NC State.

Art and Design senior Stephanie Huang took the Grand Prize, while other students from a range of disciplines were also recognized. Huang’s project, Poverty: The Architecture of Segregation, is a well-paced, narrated animation that connects today’s higher poverty rates among American minorities to a historical lack of enforcement of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Huang sets telling demographics and statistics against information familiar to a viewer, such as housing costs and educational access.

The Multimedia Research Contest encourages students and student teams to develop multimedia projects addressing a theme situated in a historical, social, or cultural context. Projects may take any number of different forms, including websites, 3D visualizations, games, animations, or other creative formats that communicate research insights in a visual or interactive manner. This year’s theme was food, clothing, and shelter. Submissions more than doubled over the contest’s first year.

The winning students were honored at a reception in April, during which their winning entries were displayed on the walls of the D. H. Hill Jr. Library Visualization Studio. All winning entries are also currently viewable online.

In addition to the Grand Prize, three honorable mentions were awarded. Santhosh Radhakrishnan, a graduate student in Aerospace Engineering, created Feijoada, Kimono, and Baserri, a video package that gives a cultural overview of international cities such as Kathmandu, Tehran, and Addis Ababa in the words of native NC State students. Radhakrishnan’s data visualization artwork “Code_Climate” recently took first prize in the second annual NCSU Libraries Code+Art Student Visualization Contest.

Anahid Telfeyan’s interactive website, Syrian Refugee Crisis, differentiates refugee status from asylum status and provides insight into the current-day crisis for different scales of experience. Users can click on different countries to see asylum statistics and history and to learn details about the process that refugees face in seeking asylum there. Telfeyan graduated from the School of Design this spring.

Nupoor Jalindre and Arthur Berger, both graduate students studying Technical Communication, created Indigenous Culture, an interactive website that gives a sense of how traditional Native American culture has changed over time. Aggregating information from many sources, the site concentrates on Cherokee, Navajo, and Sioux tribes.