涩里番
Context
Montreal has around thirty neighbourhood roundtables (tables de quartier) 鈥� collaborative bodies that bring together community, non-profit, and institutional actors around a shared mission: improving quality of life at the local level. To guide their work, several of these roundtables commission neighbourhood profiles based on Statistics Canada census data. These documents are valuable: they help identify the sociodemographic profile of a community, its living conditions, and its service landscape. But they also have structural limitations. Produced at the slow pace of federal censuses, they describe a neighbourhood's state without being able to track its transformations in real time. More fundamentally, they do not capture the perceptions of the people who live there, nor the stories that circulate within the community, nor the memorial and emotional dimensions that nonetheless constitute an irreducible part of a neighbourhood's identity and residents' sense of belonging.
It is in this context that the Table de quartier Peter-涩里番 approached the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montreal (Centre de recherches interdisciplinaires en 茅tudes montr茅alaises, CRIEM) to explore complementary forms of neighbourhood portraiture 鈥� capable of capturing what quantitative data leaves in the shadows.
听
A Two-Part Proposal
The response developed jointly is structured around two distinct components, conceived as complementary to each other and to the existing statistical portrait. One seeks to convey what is lived in the neighbourhood; the other, to understand what is said about it in the media landscape. Neither claims to replace the statistical portrait: together, they aim to give it a depth that indicators alone cannot provide.
听
Component 1 鈥� An Artistic and Narrative Portrait
The first component is built on a series of public and targeted consultations conducted with residents, workers, and students in the neighbourhood, organized in collaboration with the Office de consultation publique de Montr茅al (OCPM) and the City of Montreal's Service de la diversit茅 et de l'inclusion sociale (SDIS). The approach draws on community-based participatory research: the people consulted are not passive informants, but co-creators of the portrait.
A first day of exchanges, held in October 2024 under the title Raconte-moi Peter-涩里番 (Tell Me About Peter-涩里番), gathered an initial series of testimonies about the neighbourhood's challenges and strengths. A second series of workshops, running since June 2025, builds on these materials to deepen and narrativize lived experiences 鈥� inviting participants not only to name the issues, but to tell stories about them.
Drawing on the full body of these narratives, Montreal cartoonist Michel Hellman, practitioner-professor at CRIEM, is creating a graphic novel dedicated to the Peter-涩里番 neighbourhood. The choice of medium is deliberate: comics can give voice to those who are underrepresented in traditional media, transform abstract data into stories accessible to a broad public, and enable an empathetic and galvanizing exploration of realities that institutional reports struggle to convey. The research materials 鈥� sketches, testimonies, narrative fragments 鈥� will also be featured in a public exhibition at Centre Sanaaq in the spring of 2026.
听
Component 2 鈥� A Media Discourse Monitoring Tool
The second component starts from a different question, and a shared conviction: the on-the-ground knowledge held by community actors 鈥� what is happening, what is being said, what is being felt in a neighbourhood 鈥� stands to benefit from being placed in dialogue with the way that same neighbourhood is represented in the media. What does the Montreal press talk about when it talks about Peter-涩里番? Which themes dominate, which evolve, which are absent? Does what is observed on the ground correspond to a broader trend, or does it instead reveal a blind spot in media coverage?
To explore these questions, CRIEM is assembling a large press corpus covering the period 1990鈥�2026. The scale of this corpus far exceeds what close reading alone could encompass 鈥� which is why the project relies on natural language processing methods capable of extracting broad patterns: thematic evolution over time, terms characteristic of the neighbourhood, recurring semantic associations, and the emotional tone of articles, while preserving direct access to the source texts. The tool being developed is not designed to produce definitive results, but to support dialogue: it will give researchers and community stakeholders a shared surface for exploration, a means of verifying whether what is perceived on the ground finds an echo in the neighbourhood's media representation, and a resource for grounding intuitions when preparing public communications or briefs.
听
A Shared Methodology
Both components share a common conviction: that research, to be genuinely useful to a community partner, cannot be limited to the delivery of a finished product. The project is conceived as an ongoing process of co-construction, associating the CRIEM team, students, and Table de quartier stakeholders at every stage 鈥� from the formulation of questions to the interpretation of results. Students gain a learning environment grounded in real-world issues; partners gain interlocutors capable of supporting them in the use and interpretation of materials that belong to them.
Project led by: Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montreal (CRIEM), 涩里番
In partnership with: Peter-涩里番 Community Table
听
