This week our team has been focusing on the best way to approach writing our final group report for our community partner. We have found reputable articles and outlined our paper. We want the paper to be both cohesive and consistent in our analysis of the two case studies. We did not realize how challenging writing a group report is, so this week in our team meeting we brainstormed various ways to write the paper. The first idea we came up with was assigning each person an aspect of the case study to focus on; for example, one person could focus on the economic aspects, such as incentivizing businesses to move into innovation districts, for both the Boston Seaport District and the Freemont Innovation District. A drawback to this approach is that the two cases are different and we don’t want to force a broad framework that may not necessarily fit or apply to the situation. The second idea we came up with was having two people focus on the Boston Seaport District and having the two other members of the team focus on the Fremont Innovation District. We are going to continue to discuss the best approach to writing the paper, as we add to our research and further develop our outline, but we all agreed that it would be best to meet to draft a conclusion and best practices section so that we can compare findings, discuss why the case studies matter, and relate our findings back to Milpitas. We think it is very important to synthesize our findings as a group, and make sure all of our perspectives are represented in the executive summary.
Next Friday, we are going to the Fremont Innovation District to meet with Christina Briggs, the Economic Development Director of the City of Fremont. We are planning on touring their district. Below are some of the questions we are planning on asking Christina:
On Monday in class, we visited the Stanford Educational Farm and heard from Ryan Thayer on what he learned from working with corner stores in the Tenderloin District. The unifying thread for our visit to the farm and our discussion with Ryan was food security. While, the development of an innovation district in Milpitas does not directly tie back to food security, the introduction of an innovation district to the Milpitas area does have the potential to impact the composition of the city, and thus potentially impacting the food landscape. On our visit to Milpitas, we noted that there was only one grocery store in the city, a bargain grocery store located on the outskirts. Alex pointed out the location of the Sunday Farmer’s Market and told us that many people buy their fresh produce from there. Additionally, many of the restaurants we saw were mom and pop shops and many of them also appeared to be run by immigrant families. While the main focus for our project, is not on food security, I think we can find ways to include this in our report as it is an important topic relating back to social equity, something our team is really interested in. Additionally, this is an important issue for the city to consider going forward, as it is important to make sure residents have access to healthy options; however, the city must be strategic to work with existing restaurant and grocery store owners, so that they do not cause local businesses to be displaced. Update on project activities
Today, we had a very informative meeting with Alexi. She walked us through the processes going forward for converting our transcripts into edited audio clips. We’ve also done a few things to move forward with the editing process and get us toward our deliverables. We have each created a folder in our shared drive to hold our transcriptions. This is where we will copy the text version of our transcriptions. During our transcription processes, we each highlighted sections that we thought we could potentially use in our final clip. We will also be adding these highlighted sections to our drive, and using that to work through creating a shorter clip. We are wrapping up our transcriptions and are looking forward to embarking on the editing process. Our next steps will be making the first stages of a script. Alexi explained that we can either approach this process as “parsing down” large blocks of text from the interviews, or we can cut-and-paste sections of the interviews to create some sense of a five-minute story. Once we have created a “paper cut” that is a rough cut-and-paste version of the text from our interview, we will send it to Alexi to get advice before we move forward. We will be in close communication over email, especially as we start the editing process. We will be using “free trials” for Adobe Premier to edit our audio clips, although we won’t start editing the actual audio until we get a final script for the text-versions of the transcriptions. What we observed and learned This week, we have learned a ton from our individual interview transcriptions. As we approach the end of the “transcription” part of the project, we are all reflecting on the content and power of the stories that we’ve heard. The stories are vastly different, and each draw upon different elements of the class. When beginning to think about how to create our edited clips, it is increasingly important to use the readings and frameworks that we have learned to make our “paper cuts” and then scripts. Alexi recommended that we draw upon “Problems of Editing First-Person Sociology,” and other readings that she will send out soon to help us with the process. We each got to talk with Alexi about how the interviews are sitting with us, and what sorts of themes they brought up. Thinking about themes and favorite portions of the interviews will help us find a jumping-off-point for the editing process. Critical analysis/moving forward Now that we’ve finished the transcriptions, our next step is selecting passage for our video. Compared to editing transcripts, we have a lot more liberty, since we choose which sections to include in our narratives and which to exclude. As such, we need to approach this next phase of the project with a lot more intentionality. We have several ways to approach the process of selecting passages. Are we going to include snippets of every subject the interviewees touch on, or should we try and select one or two topics and build a narrative around those? It’s likely we’re going to choose the latter because that provides for better storytelling, but then the question of which topics we will pick arises. Given the mission of our organization, we are going to pay special attention to housing moving forward, but any other themes should vary from interview to interview. For example, interviews with the African Advocacy Network, a Bay Area nonprofit that provides services and advocates for African immigrants, would include discussions about the experience of immigrants and the diversity in the African community. Once a topic is chosen, the ordering of audio is also a part of the process that deserves special attention. Many of the questions in the interview focus on trends. Is it preferable to focus on personal experiences of the interviewee, or broader trends that they’ve noticed about housing the Bay Area. All of these are questions that we need to consider as we move forward. Update on Project Activities
This week was spent largely on refocusing our scope and more clearly defining our approach going forward. With one month ahead of us, we aim to dedicate significantly more time actively mapping and putting the rest of the project deliverables together. In this regard, we have decided to split up the roles among ourselves for the coming week(s):
In terms of our progress on mapping activities this week:
What We Observed and Learned A recent study from MIT looked at the effect of lowering transit fares on lower-income individuals in the Boston Area. Their methodology involved giving 50% discounts off of rail fares for those who participated in the SNAP program and tracking their transit usage and destinations through daily text messages and CharlieCard (their version of a Clipper card) usage data. In their preliminary results, they found that discounted fares increased ridership by about 30%, and they also found that low income riders are more likely to travel at off-peak times and to use prepaid transit cards to travel. They also were found to utilize buses heavily and switch between modes often. The results of this study can help us to think about possible recommendations we can make after finding Communities of Concern which lack access. Another question we have asked ourselves over the course of the past week is, “What is ‘access’?” In thinking about the real life experiences of individuals “accessing” transit, it is unreasonable to believe that they can travel “as the crow flies” within a 3-mile radius of the Caltrain stations. Instead of this technique, we have used our network analysis tools to create an isochrone analysis of the reasonable distance a person can travel on existing infrastructure (bike lanes, roads, sidewalks, etc.). This better represents the routes that people can take to get from their Communities of Concern to transit stations, and it will give us a better understanding of which transit routes actually intersect with pedestrian routes. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward As we progress on our mapping analysis, we are looking at starting our final project deliverables. In order to ensure that our recommendations are accurate and impactful, we are working on developing a draft of our final project recommendations to relay to our community partners with the goal of receiving critical feedback to further develop our analysis. These efforts are in tandem with our continued work in GIS to find improvements for areas with Communities of Concern. With this wide breadth of area to cover and a decreasing, finite amount of time with this project, further coordination with our project partners is required in order to cater to their needs - this coordination will be especially useful in case the deadline becomes a pressing concern, helping us narrow down our scope of work. One area that our team is hoping to incorporate as a part of our final deliverables is the integration of general commute patterns on the Peninsula. This examination of the usage of existing transit options in the Bay Area may help us gain some perspective into which areas of the Peninsula experience a gap in available transit solutions and provide recommendations through that analysis. This, and other analysis efforts, need ridership data from SamTrans since it is one major transit provider in the Bay Area. Although this data is not open source, we have contacted some connections at SamTrans and hope to have data for GIS analysis soon. In the wake of the final written report, we have started allocating our roles to complete the writing. After a team meeting this past week, we recognized that our team members specialize in different skills - those who are less proficient in GIS analysis are looking forward at portions of the final report that require more research and writing work, such as the Literature Review and synthesizing the Project Purpose and Methodologies. Reallocating this work helps prepare our group for the increasing amount of work in the final weeks as our project winds to a close. |
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