My research is on human trafficking in the United States, with a specific focus on either just PA, or at the very least the east coast. Most people don’t realize that human trafficking is an issue in the US; they think it only happens in third-world countries. I want to bring awareness to the fact that it does, indeed, happen right here in our country, under our noses.
The audience for my project is the general public. I want to provide a website where they are able to see the facts about human trafficking and just how prevalent of an issue it is, as well as show them what they can do to help combat it. My research questions, to be more specific, are what does human trafficking look like in our area, and what can we do to stop it?
I hope to create a site that includes data about the kind of people that are affected by human trafficking, because it really can be anyone. This would include statistics about the gender, age, nationality, and economic status of the individuals, to name a few categories. I also want to have an interactive heat map showing the amount of human trafficking cases that were reported in each state in 2018. I think it would be important for it to be interactive so people visiting my sight will be more engaged and get more from the information. Having a map of the US will also, I hope, hit a nerve with people when they realise that there are reports of human trafficking no matter where they are from. There will also be a page with either video or audio interviews, or both, with various people somehow involved with human trafficking. A given person might be a nurse at the hospital who teaches courses to other nurses on how to recognize signs of human trafficking in patients that come into the ER, or a volunteer with an organization that helps combat human trafficking, or possibly even a person who has experienced trafficking themselves. I believe these interviews will be very important because in a way it makes this information I am presenting “more real”. Seeing and listening to a person talk about something that is so delicate of a topic will help my audience to feel a connection to what I’m presenting them, rather that just be an observer viewing facts.
One project I found that is not the same topic but is similar is one called The Broken Paths of Freedom completed by Daryle Williams at Stanford University. This project is about the geographies of enslavement, emancipation, and liberty traversed by Free Africans. It includes a lot of background on the information as well as visualizations and maps of the events taking place and exactly where, as well as the paths that were taken by various individuals. Now this is not the same topic; I am focusing on modern day slavery in America, verses this project’s 17th century slavery in the Brazilian empire, but I still feel like the basic skeleton of the project is very similar to mine.
Another project that I found that had the same topic was done by Erin Campbell, a senior at MSU. At the end of a semester-long internship with their Digital Scholarship Lab, she decided to do research on human trafficking. Her project, however was an event rather than a website. This event included a panel of people that worked with organizations that combat human trafficking as well as a virtual reality performance in the lab’s 360-degree visualization room depicting various scenarios people might find themselves in when being trafficked. Other than the very obvious contrasting nature of her final project and my desired final project, this project is very similar to mine in that we both want to connect with people who have made differences in this issue and present our information in captivating ways. I plan to take my research further by creating a source that people will be able to look at and refer to no matter when/where they are. I want my audience to not just see the dramatized version of things, but also be able to look at the data for themselves.