The past two weeks have been devoted to developing our idea and topic into a viable project, but in our first class back after U of T’s reading week, it was officially time to start working on the project itself. After this class, we only have three more weeks before we have to submit our work, so we spent this week finalizing our last few concepts and gathering information so we’ll be ready to start building our story map in the coming weeks. We also decided to slightly change our topic research question, instead of solely focusing on gang related violence, we decided.
One of the last things we had to decide was who our project was for. This wasn’t something we’d thought about consciously, but it was quite apparent in the way we were structuring our project that we were aiming to appeal to a fairly general audience who didn’t have much prior knowledge of Regent Park. This week we were discussing including a short reel of news clips discussing violence and crime in Regent Park as a sort of introduction to our project and to outsiders’ perceptions of the neighbourhood; in this way, we’d be getting the attention of people who didn’t know too much about Regent Park beyond its negative representation in media and guiding them into a narrative that challenges their perceptions.
During our time together at Regent Park we got started on our research questions for our group members and specialists. Asae and Julie brought pages full of specific crimes that took place in the neighbourhood with specific dates and even showed us news reports on some of the crimes they personally remember. Semhar told us when Lloyd, our specialist that works for the Safety Network, would be free for an interview. We also went over our project plan to go over what we’re going to include and the layout of the website. A new addition to the project we decided to add is a short intro video of Regent Park depicting the violence and crime before the revitalization.
Because we want to make our findings available to a broad audience, it is essential for our medium to be something that many people could easily use as well. This is something we’re fairly confident about, because story maps are fairly accessible to most people: if you can find a certain location using Google Maps or read a blog post, you can probably navigate a story map fairly easily. Using a story map also provides us with a relatively easy avenue to make our project interactive: story maps can be adjusted and moved around to reflect the interests of the person using it, allowing them to engage with our project in ways we might not have thought of ourselves.
As we were looking for crime statistics for Regent Park on the internet, specific data for the neighborhood was hard to find. Many sources had data for the whole of Toronto, not just Regent Park. The only source that did have data on Regent Park were the Toronto Police databases, however they only have data going back to 2014. As far as research goes on crime statistics, we’re going to look into it a bit more. As for general sentiments on crime in Regent Park going back to pre-revitalization, they are relatively easier to find with news articles and our interview questions. Going forward we’ll have to find other sources for crime statistics and maybe some more interviews with other residents when we go back next Thursday.
Outside of class time we did manage to interview Asae, Lloyd and Semhar on Saturday, unfortunately Julie was sick. These first rounds of interviews were a success however it did not go as we imagined it would. The questions did not get the answers we hoped to receive and our filming location wasn’t the greatest as there was a Swedish Christmas showcase taking place in the building. We’re going back to our questions to see if we can revise them and plan to do some additional filming when we get back together next class.
Dawn in Regent Park: Andrew, Asae, Julie, Meghan, and Semhar.