11.17 Oral history and appointments to talk about research projects

Today you conducted a kind of mini-oral history interview about memories of your experiences of 9-11, and we used your reflections on conducting the interviews as a basis for talking about the points in our text book's essay about oral history.

We considered how the material you gathered in our short interviews "recovered" material that supplemented mainstream stories for what 9-11 was about.  One of the first things we noticed was recurring efforts to "shield" young people (most of you were in middle-school through high school) from the event, and to place the "story" of 9-11 in the control of parents.  This is a different perspective on what happened - and how it affected people - than is usually set forward, and it tells us something about our culture in that time and place. In our discussion of your stories about 9-11, we also noted connections between the way you represented "what happened" and representations in the media and popular culture.  As pointed out in the textbook essay, we generally relate our experiences in terms of stories that are "out there" and experiences that don't fit into readily available stories can be harder to tell.

We also considered ethical considerations associated with who has control of interview material.  You took part in an in-class exercise to see if the interviewer and the subject had the same "interpretation" of what was said, and while most of you had excellent agreement - there were aspects of the conversations that one person remembered or noticed that did not stand out to the other.  These differences can "matter" to subjects when researchers write up their results.  We talked about the three ways to "get permission" listed in the text, and about collaborative analysis of transcripts => the approach taken in participatory research associated with oral history.

We briefly touched on methods to for analyzing and interpreting oral history interviews - and noted that it often involved techniques associated with textual analysis, literary analysis, discourse analysis, and quantitative analysis.

I have been conferencing with you about your research projects.  Your post discussing your research question, describing your methods, and listing/describing relevant research is due December 1.  You should have a good hand on what you will be posting BEFORE Thanksgiving break so you are on the right track (and can read the necessary background material.  Check the assignment sheet or email me if you have questions.


I will not be answering emails from Wednesday, Nov 23 - Saturday November 26. 


On Tuesday, Nici + Jazmyne will give a presentation on Quantitative research (the oral history article => available through the Kean data bases), and I will present some "number data" from the Kean University writing program so you can get an idea about how quantitative data is used in writing studies.


Have a good weekend, and see you on Monday.