Election Day 2012 - Alison Mango

On Election Day 2012, Kelly Mueller and I collected a wide range of political views from both Lehigh's campus and the north side of Bethlehem to contribute to the #JElection hashtag on Twitter. We grabbed a few people walking to and from class or around campus, but our main goal was to head into the UC. One of the Sodexo workers allowed us to enter Lower Cort without swipe access to do some interviews. These people were more at ease talking to us, because they were in less of a rush. But, because it was crowded, it made for some noisy interviews. My least favorite video came from here, when we interviewed a freshman girl who was hesitant to participate, but ended up doing so anyway. I think that her reluctance to talk, and the loud noise, made this video not one of our best. Also, because it was loud in the room, we tried to put the camera closer to her face, which only resulted in an awkward close-up. To tackle our off-campus interviews, Kelly and I decided to head over to the north side, where we thought we would find more people leisurely shopping around who would hopefully be willing to talk to us. We were surprised that we got a good mixture of people who weren't interested and people who were very adamant to share their views. We tried to get a variety of people, such as construction workers, sales people, and others just walking the streets. This proved to pay off because we got some unexpected answers and many different insights from people. Below was my favorite video of the day, taken on the north side in a store called The Attic. I like this video because it was a quiet setting, and the salesperson who is talking is willing to elaborate on her views. I like that it's an interesting background that matches the interesting subject. I liked this project because it gave me the chance to see the variety of different views that people have. It's interesting to see what was important to most people, economic and social issues, but also to see that their specific interests in those topics were often catered to what they did. It gave us a good opportunity to get out there and talk to people about their beliefs, and many were excited about getting their opinions out in the open. ALISON MANGO