If you’ve followed us since our first blog post back in October, you’ve seen our project develop from the very beginning. Over the past few weeks, we’ve taken Dawn in Regent Park from an idea to a workable research question to the final drafts of our project, which we’re looking forward to showcasing in a few days. It’s been quite the ride, and watching it come to an end gives us both a sense of pride in creating knowledge and a feeling of sadness. We hope you’ve enjoyed following our stories as much as we’ve enjoyed telling them!
With that said, we’d like to give you a sneak peek of our project as we enter the final stages of putting it together!
As we mentioned in previous posts, we’re putting together a Story Map to combine the narrative format of an article with maps to put things into a geographical perspective. Crime isn’t something that happens in a vacuum, and space has a feeling to it; maybe you feel safe inside your house, but unsafe at a particular street corner. That’s why using maps made the most sense to us: if we wanted to tell a story about feeling safe in Regent Park, we were going to have to show where that feeling was.
This has been challenging, as data on crime isn’t always the easiest to find: many sources, such as the Toronto Police Service (where much of our spatial data came from), only keep records back to 2014, making it tricky to tie revitalization back to our initial theories; in addition, most crime data is only tied to the nearest intersection to protect victims’ privacy, meaning that every single data point is tied to one of the same few locations—which makes it very hard to show where the most safety issues are. This second problem is by far the easiest to remedy, and the reason we chose to do a heat map as shown in the following photo instead of marking each individual incident as a dot or point on the map; by doing this, we can map several incidents at the same point all at once with a change in how they look.
One of the final maps for Dawn in Regent Park’s project; this one is a heat map of all crimes between January 2018 and June 2022.
Along with these maps, we’ve done some supporting research to help explain our findings, the project, and the questions we’ve asked. This includes articles from news outlets and academic literature, pieces we’ve read for class, and a variety of other elements to provide some academic backing and depth to our research. The writing we’re including in our project helps to tell our story better than a map alone, as it can explain things we just can’t map. It’s hard to find an exact geographical measure of people’s sense of safety, or attitudes toward Regent Park from the outside world; in this way, we can tell a story with words as well as with images.
A screenshot of the introduction to our Story Map.
Woven through our story alongside the text and the maps are a series of guided interviews that we filmed over the duration of our project. We interviewed each one of our members about their experiences with crime and safety in Regent Park, as well as community safety expert Lloyd Pike. It was important to us that the story of safety in Regent Park be told by people who had lived experience of it, so we are including these interviews throughout our Story Map as well.
A still from our interview with Julie, where we talked about her experiences with crime and safety in Regent Park
The multimedia nature of our project is exactly why we chose to do a Story Map; each piece allows you (the reader) to engage with issues of safety in Regent Park in a different way. It also gave us the chance to share who we are, both as a group and as people. Each part of our project speaks to our group’s passions and skillsets, from the video editing to the map-making to the stories told and even the topic itself.
Thank you for following Dawn in Regent Park as we put together this project from start to finish! This has been a wonderful adventure and we look forward to sharing our project with you in the coming days!
Dawn in Regent Park: Andrew, Asae, Julie, Meghan, and Semhar.