You enter a zip code and optionally choose a radius by clicking the Distance button. You'll be presented with a list of projects within that region that were funded by the NEH. The View Summary button gives a breakdown of the projects by category and tells you what the colors mean.
I'm Patrick Smyth, a graduate student in English and a Digital Fellow at the Graduate Center. I made this site as part of a larger effort by Matt Gold, Lisa Rhody, and the Digital Fellows to show why the NEH is a critical institution and should continue to be funded.
I work on a project funded by the NEH called DH Box, which is one reason defunding the NEH hits close to home for me. What bothers me most, though, is thinking of all the critical projects and programs that will never be possible if the NEH is defunded. Archives will go unexplored, history will go unpreserved, and students will go untaught. If the United States cares about its culture—and it should—we should all care about the NEH.
The site is written in Python using a lightweight web framework called Flask. The design is mostly hand-coded in CSS with Skeleton responsive boilerplate used as a basis. The animations are standard JQuery. You can read the code on GitHub.
Data on grant-funded projects is from open data provided by the NEH. Information on the relative distances between zip codes was adapted from data from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Data was converted from text-based formats to a sqlite database for use with the web app.