- Project Summary: In no more than 200 words, provide a brief description of your project, including the puzzle you intend to address, the key questions your project attempts to answer, and a brief discussion of how you intend on answering those questions.
The idea for my final project came out of a comment that my government professor made during my political philosophy class. He claimed that “no one would lock their doors in Maine, but everyone should lock their doors in New York”. As someone from urban New York, comments like this never sat right with me being that there is a potential for harm everywhere one goes. This is why I will be focusing on public safety. Where do our conceptions of public safety come from? What are the cities that people think are the safest? What aspects of a city make it safer? I intend to do a mass survey of both professors and students at Bowdoin. I will do some quantitative surveys so I can make charts, as well as qualitative surveys so I can pick apart the language the respondents use. I hypothesize that conceptions of safety are formulated among racial and class lines, but I want to conduct interviews to explore the nuances of my claim.
Revised Project Summary:
I will be exploring the relationship between media vilification and the perception of safety in New York City. The project will be a Digital exploration that will include video and Audio to guide the viewer through how hyperbolized media affects us. I will be talking about how hyperbolized media has led to the NYC “crime scare” that is happening lately, although statistics say otherwise. I will be pulling from the NYPD’s Annual Reports. Every year, the NYPD puts out reports on the cities crime rate and to support my claims about the downward trends in crime, I reference this data.