On November 15, the American Communities Project (ACP) received $2.4 million in funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation towards their new project, “Analyzing American economic and demographic fragmentation at the community level.” Director of the project and the ACP, Dante Chinni and senior editor/writer and project manager, Ari Pinkus seek to study the nation’s cultural and political divides in this study.

The American Communities Project, based in the J-School of ComArtSci, is an organization devoted to finding better ways of understanding the different community types that make up America in hopes of using that information to measure what does and does not work within those communities. Despite the connectedness the internet and technology bring to the nation, communities across the country experience the world very differently from one another.

Chinni and Pinkus plan to utilize data and a journalistic approach when carrying out this project. Using the ACP’s county typology that breaks the nation into 15 distinct community types, they intend to create and implement survey research in order to continually update the ACP’s website which will make collected data more accessible to all. Their overall goal is to understand the forces that are driving division across the nation with hopes of finding ways to re-connect the country’s gaps in an unprecedented time of cultural, technological, socioeconomical and political change.

Read the full story on the Communication Arts and Sciences website.