Project Proposal: Kinsey Project!

Our group consists of Chelsea (designer/artist), Martin (data manager), Neha (communicator), and Courtney (educator).

The Kinsey Institute aims to acquire and spread knowledge about all types of sexual information. An ongoing citizen science project run by the Kinsey Institute is Kinsey Reporter. The Kinsey Reporter’s website describes the project as “a global mobile survey platform to share, explore, and visualize anonymous data about sex.”

This smartphone application allows people with data connection anywhere to provide updates about any sexual behaviors they see, ranging from innocent flirtatious smiles to public displays of affection to even what people watch on their computers. Our group plans to observe trends in types of romantic behaviors, specifically flirting, that are seen between people in various areas of New York City.

We plan to spread our observations over two or three distinct locations. We will observe the campus at Brooklyn College Campus, which will hopefully provide information about young adults. We also want to observe Manhattan because that is often the playground for many couples. We are aiming to go to Central Park and Times Square, which will probably give us an older clientele to collect data from. We would like to add in observations we can make at the American Museum of Natural History, if we have time to continue our observations by the time we make our class trip (we might already be in the final stages of piecing together our digital deliverable). As we make our observations, we will submit them to Kinsey Reporter via the smartphone app. The website has publicly available data which we can examine and analyze. We can then see how our group’s data compares with the overall trends of the global data.

This project deviates greatly from hard science and this might prove to be a challenge to tie back to an actual science. However, it can achieve the first learning strand of sparking interest, and so that starts us on our way. Once we find out more background information about the project and topic, we can hopefully better see the scientific aspect behind the Kinsey Project (as opposed to the more obvious anthropological aspect) and that should help us deal with this challenge. Another challenge is that it might be difficult to have black-and-white definitions of what exact actions constitute flirting, considering that we are only watching strangers from afar. We can deal with this problem by laying out what our group’s concrete definitions of flirtatious behavior is so that the group members can have consistency in logging their observations.

This project has a strong capability of creating interest and attracting an audience, and so it seems fitting to have a deliverable that is digital-based rather than a co-authored paper. We believe a comedic documentary-styled deliverable will prove to be entertaining and exciting for audiences. At the same time, a documentary can cover scientific topics that can inspire informal science learning!