DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

I think this project will provide me the opportunity to exercise the skills, knowledge, and methods that I accumulated during my studies in this program.  For this senior project we will be reviewing articles relating to the 10 year anniversary of the September 11th attack and the media representations of it.  In order to be successful, one of the practices I learned in research methods is to break the project into sections.  Currently, in this first stage I am collecting article relating to the commemoration and working on a tagging and coding system based on common words with the goal of identifying patterns and common phrases.

In any research project you should start with a question (or problem) and hypotheses. For this project mine is “what are we commemorating” and my hypothesis is that the commemoration focuses mainly on the loss or absences; whether it be of loved ones, the security of the nation, or the physical buildings that has forever changed the New York City skyline.  After reading your comments on my first discussion post I took a closer look at Halbwachs theory on collective memory and want to take it beyond just spatial absence.  In many way the reflecting pools that sit where the twin towers stood signifies this spatial absence however it would be incomplete without the approximately 3 thousand names of the victims that represents more than a spatial loss.

Some of the challenges I foresee with this project is sorting through the complexity of what the event truly means to people and how it’s remember.  Moving from each person’s individual memory to the collective consciousness of the event will be the greatest challenge.

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.