My name is Dan royals.
I'm an Assistant Professor in
the History Department and I
do a lot of work with oral history.
I teach oral history in the history department,
and it's also an important part of my research.
My research so far has focused
on African-American aids activism.
And for that project or for that research,
oral history is really important.
I'm way to access histories
that either haven't made it into
archives yet or underrepresented in archives.
Certainly underrepresented in public conversations
about aids and aids activism.
So that's a little bit about me.
I'd like to just hear a little bit, right?
You could do a quick round of introductions.
Helped me, you know who I'm talking to, that'd be great.
Let's start start here. Hello.
My name is Alejandro Gonzalez.
I am 22.
I am a digital arts student.
I'm currently interning with
the Jewish Museum of Florida.
And I'm having a blast.
It's great. Okay. Hello.
Hello. I'm Christopher Monte Hall.
I'm a computer science or philosophy
double-major and I'm currently interning with Stonewall.
And I'm also having a blast.
Right.
Hi, I'm Sonya. I'm 22.
I was senior.
I'm studying international relations and French and I'm
working at this Gaia also having
a blast. Yeah, that's it.
I'm Vincent.
I'm an art history major and
I'm at the Museum of graffiti.
My name is Marin.
I'm a linguistics major and I'm
starting at the World Aids museum next week.
You'll have a blast.
Yeah, go ahead. I'm Katie.
I work with everybody because I'm the archivists and WPA
AHL we've met with I think you guys are in for a treat.
I saw this presentation a few months ago
or one similar with Dan.
And it's very informative and I learned quite a bit.
Awesome. We had a blast and I had a blast.
Alright, so let's dive in to
oral history with a little bit of a definition.
As is the case with a lot of academic things.
One thing that we'd like to talk
a lot about is definitions.
And so oral history,
oral historians, as you
talk about kind of how we define our fields.
So this is one, I think,
really good definition of what oral history is.
And it's recording personal testimony in oral form for
purposes beyond the interview itself,
I want to highlight a couple of
elements of this definition.
One is that it is recorded
testimony and that's really important.
We are creating a document
of someone's experience by talking to them,
by eliciting orally from them stories about their life,
stories about the aspects
of their life that we're interested in.
So it is important that testimony comes to us. Oral-b.
There's a lot of thinking and theorizing
and writing in the field of oral history
about what it means to elicit and give and
record specifically oral testimony and how
that differs from perhaps other kinds of documentation,
written testimony, letters, diaries,
things of that nature.
Then this is done for
purposes beyond the interview itself.
So we do this as maybe a matter of
our research or archive building.
And this kinda ties back to the idea
that this is recorded, right?
We're creating a document that ideally will live in
a library or an archive so that not only we can use it,
but other people down the line can use it as well.
One thing to keep in mind here is that
if you if and when you go
and do an oral history with somebody,
especially if it's somebody who has not had
the opportunity to donate their papers or has
not been reported on in the press,
you might be creating the only kind of
lasting document of that person's life.
It's going to be accessible to people later on.
So there's a lot of responsibility that goes along with
doing oral history as well.
And part of the purpose of this workshop
is to give you the tools to do it.
Well, you can take that responsibility.
So other more fleshing out of
this definition or just what kind of oral history is.
Generally we're talking about pretty lengthy interviews.
At least an hour is
the guideline that I give to students
when I teach oral history.
I've had oral histories that
go quite a bit longer than an hour.
I had one that went 5 h at a stretch which
was a very long time and that kinda kinda of an outlier.
But generally, when I do interviews,
they go to two,
two-and-a-half hours, so quite a bit of time.
Remember that you're capturing
a significant chunk of somebody's life in oral testimony.
So that kinda makes sense.
When we talk about oral history,
we generally are talking about life history interviewing.
So I'm not just asking somebody about
the specific parts or
aspects of their life that we're interested in.
We're trying to get a sense of what
somebody is like as a whole person,
including the arc of
their life and where we're talking about fits into that.
A lot of my interviewing has been around
stories of activism, specifically aids activism.
And usually that's something that people came
to in their 20s or 30s.
But I always start my interviews with Tell me about
your early life because I really want to know.
It was kind of back in childhood in
somebody's early community and their family life
that led them to the path that they got on.
That brought them to intersect with my research, right?
So having them do that for me,
having them give me a sense of where they came
from and having them often
explicitly draw those connections for,
for me and for people down
the line can be really, really interesting.
Life history is an important aspect of this as well.
Generally, when we're talking about oral history,
we are talking about one-on-one interviewing.
So I am like an interviewer.
I'm sitting down with.
I'm the person that we call the narrator.
And I'll talk about why in a little bit.
But I'm sitting with them
one-on-one, having a conversation,
fully listening to and paying attention
to what they have to say.
The reason that I point this out is
that sometimes people have
the idea and it's not a bad idea.
Interviewing, say, a husband and wife or
a small group of people who were
very active in the movement together.
And certainly you can do that.
It's something that you want to be
deliberate about and conscious of.
Because whenever you bring a group of people,
whether it's two people or three people or four people,
into an interview setting,
you bring in all of
their interpersonal dynamics that
can get complicated, right?
Like if you're interviewing, say,
a husband and wife or a parent and child,
or two siblings or two long time best friends.
You're probably bringing some kind of power dynamics.
I'm kind of power imbalance into the interview.
And that is probably going to shape what
you get in terms of answers to questions.
You might get less candid answers
to your questions than you might otherwise.
So generally we are talking about a one-on-one interview.
But it is a very flexible research method.
There's a lot of different ways that you can
modulate different variables of
this in order to make it fit your research needs.
Then finally, again, because this is
interviewing being done for
purposes beyond the interview itself,
we are talking about interviews that are
archived or otherwise preserved.
So starting out with a plan that this is going to go
into the Jewish Museum or the World Aids museum,
or is going to be kept at Stonewall or
an FAQ libraries is going to be made
accessible to researchers in
the future in one way or another.
So why do oral history, why is this important?
Well, one important reason
is that it lets us capture the experiences of
people whose voices would otherwise not be
preserved and the historical record.
So this is something that we think about
when we are considering a project.
When we're picking the people that we want to interview,
is that archives are pretty good at
preserving the stories of
people who have some kind of power.
Whether that's political power,
institutional power, social power.
So people who are white and
male of European descent tend to be overrepresented.
In archives.
People who are not don't align with
those categories tend to be
very underrepresented in archives.
So it's a good way to kind of get a sense
of people's experience who integers otherwise aren't,
don't have their experience captured
by the historical record.
It's really a good method or
an important method because
in doing this kind of interviewing,
we're giving agency to
people whose stories are being recorded.
So by sitting down with somebody,
by asking them questions,
by giving them, creating the space for
them to tell their story and recorded way.
You're giving somebody agency,
giving somebody a level of control over
how their story is going to be shaped in
preserved for the future.
There's something really valuable about that.
It helps us to understand what can often be big kind of
abstract phenomena or events, processes.
Things like immigration, gentrification.
Political change,
revolution helps us to
understand what can be very big kind of
abstract concepts at the level
of people's individual experience.
And maybe get a collection of those experiences to
make a composite portrait of how people,
how individual people experienced something that
is in this larger form, harder to represent.
It helps us to understand the people that we talk
to as whole people.
So I know a lot of you are working in
archives and so you know what you
may find as you're going
through a collection of documents,
wherever they might be,
you'll find little snippets of
people like little documentary fragments.
Somebody who gets mentioned in
a newspaper article or somebody who writes a letter,
you get these little glimpses into
people's lives that are fragmentary.
They're like little bits.
Oral history. That's, you get a sense of
somebody as an entire,
fully fleshed out, whole human being.
Something that we don't normally get out of
archival materials that oral history
is unique contribution there.
And then again, this is a flexible,
interdisciplinary research method.
So one that you can use in lots of different ways,
in different settings on all kinds of aspects of
this that you can modulate to fit your research needs.
So I'd like to take a couple minutes right now to
just kinda brainstorm or spitball how you might
use this in your own research.
So when you're working
with your community partners with Stonewall,
with world is museum with graffiti museum,
with this guy I like how might this come into
the work that you either are doing
there or might think about doing there.
So this can be kind of theoretical or
hypothetical on the future as well? Yeah. Go ahead.
You can just speak into this.
Yes. So my research at this Gaia
is really centered around writing
a land acknowledgment statement and
giving a voice to like indigenous communities in Florida.
But what I've found is that the communities that
were in the land that
this guy is on were largely moved to Oklahoma.
So I think it would be interesting to
maybe reach out to those tribes and conduct
oral histories like to
get whatever history like they have from the tribe.
And then also just like personally how they
were affected by the move.
And if they've still feel like
they have any connection to this land.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, with Stonewall,
we have a lot of like underrepresented voices,
like not only like LGBTQ,
but also Black, Hispanic.
And so there's a lot of
underrepresented history there that
I feel like oral history.
And being able to capture and share it would
be really valuable and to wear it like yeah,
like the spaces before
has been dominated by other voices with this,
that kinda gives me an opportunity.
Yeah. Okay. Alright, I guess I'm stuck too.
Well. My experience working with
the Jewish Museum has mostly
been what you are referring to.
Are those like fragments of people that
you find that itself.
These little pieces that don't tell you
the whole story and they're often hard to place
historically and regarding their contexts
than as far as I am
able to understand based on what I've been exposed to,
oral histories are a great way to like,
get a sense of contexts than
what people were going through and how they're taking it,
and how all these macro costumes
are affecting them and how they fit within it.
Which is something that like
newspaper clippings and photographs do not give you.
So it helps things make it makes them less abstract?
Yeah, certainly. Really. No.
Thank you. I feel I could use it.
And like you said, an unbiased way,
not only personal because I guess
the stigma of graffiti is usually gang-related.
But I could explore, I could try to
expose the flaws in posing it as that.
Also at the same time, unbiased,
showing the ugly side of,
I guess the good and the bad.
To give an unbiased.
A conclusion. And then I guess since it's in an archive,
wouldn't the curator choose to?
Depending on what exhibition or what the concept
of a show would be to choose what side they want to use.
Because at the museum there is like a police section.
But there's also like
a collection of art that is based off of goofy,
you know, Keith Herring basket.
Yeah.
So I guess unbiased way
I would use it to teach people and
they can draw their own opinion from it.
What are the things that we tried to do with
oral history is to give contexts,
As you said, or has usually good for that.
But also to give people like,
more kind of complicated,
nuanced understandings of what we're talking about.
So people might think about graffiti in
this like very kind of like binary way.
Like it's like it's,
it's high art or it's crime.
And what you may find in interviewing people,
especially people who are like graffiti,
graffiti artists, is that they might bring
a more nuanced lens onto the work that they do.
And so the value of oral history
than is like helping people to kind of
see this visual form in any kind
of more complicated, complex way.
I really liked what you said about
the curator can use this in different ways,
which is absolutely true and you can think
about the interview that you do.
And so you end up with
a recording and probably a transcript.
You can do a lot of stuff
down the line with that recording.
You can enter the institution can,
in terms of clipping,
step out for documentaries,
or for podcasts or for exhibitions.
There's all kinds of like with the interview
can live in different formats later on.
And what we're doing and doing
the recording is allowing for that to happen.
Like we're making, making
that future work possible by interviewing people.
Now, Let's see other things that you
might think about and particularly
thought about this with the land acknowledgment is like,
you can think about this in terms
of doing your own interviews.
You can also think about
looking for wet interviews already exists,
like what work have people already
done that you might be able to take and
then build on into
Orlando acknowledgement or an exhibit or something else.
Also, think about how you can find what
already exists in the world in terms of this work.
And I feel like
there was one other thing that I
wanted to wanted to pull out
but maybe not o11 significant area
where there's been a lot of oral history work
done is in Holocaust Remembrance.
Something that's very much of interest
to the Jewish Museum.
To introduce yourself real quick.
Where?
Where's that word? Rooming house. Okay.
Okay.
I'm generals. I'm the leading this workshop.
So we were just talking about
a little bit about what oral history is,
kinda the components of it.
And then we're brainstorming how this
might come into the work that you're
doing for the Miami Studies Program.
So we'll get into a little bit of kind of
technical aspects of what this looks like in practice.
And so here I think it's really valuable to think about
interviews being part of a kind of like life-cycle.
If you wanted to do the lake,
I don't know, like elementary school biology,
like the butterfly is an egg and then it's a chrysalis.
Like, you know, just think about that kind of like
Wheel of nature here.
But with interviews. Before you do anything,
you want to think about kind of what's
the framing of your project?
What are your goals?
What do you want to find out?
Where does your working questions?
Do you have working ideas
about what it is that you're going to find.
And then based on that initial framing,
you're going to think about who is
it that I want to interview.
We're going to start reaching out to those people.
This can come from the archive.
You might be working in a collection and say,
I don't know, I'm working in
the act up Fort Lauderdale collection.
And I know that these people get mentioned.
I wanted to see if these people are still
living and see if I can get in touch with them.
That might be with you.
Identify an initial list of narrators.
I said I was going to explain why I
say narrators and I'll do that now.
This goes back to the question of agency and control.
Because we used the term narrators to,
instead of something like interviewee,
which is kind of like you have an action being
done on you. I'm being interviewed.
Instead we say narrators because
like I am doing an action,
I'm narrating my life experience.
So it's one of the ways that we represent
that sense of agency that we're trying
to always devolve to the
narrator's that we are interviewing.
So you might generate
an initial list from
your archival research and
then those people when you contact them,
might tell you other people to contact as well.
So you can use the kind of snowball sampling,
what we call snowball sampling method,
to start from an initial list
and then build on that to find more people to interview.
You're going to do a pre-interview where
you meet with the narrator for maybe 15,
20 min and just explain
what the process is going to look like.
That's a good opportunity for you to answer questions,
but also to start to build a rapport with them,
to build a kind of connection of familiarity,
a relationship that's going to pay off when you
actually sit down to interview them about their life.
If they feel comfortable with you,
the interview is gonna be much more
productive than if you're
talking to them for the first time.
This is a good opportunity
to explain what the process is going to look like.
Explain what kind of rates they have,
what kind of control they have over
the interview. I'll talk about in a minute.
We give them quite a bit of control
over the interview process.
Then you sit down and you do the recorded interview.
Again, this should be an hour or more.
So you're sitting down,
you have your questions,
and you are having
a conversation with this person about their life,
then you're going to transcribe the interview.
Either do it yourself or have somebody else do it.
Probably do it yourself because it's kind of expensive.
We're not to the point where
computers can do this really well for us,
at least in a way that
is kinda commercially, widely available.
But transcribing your interview,
which means like typing out basically a script of it,
is a good way
to get to know your interview material really well.
Like you have a pretty,
pretty intimate knowledge of it.
Once you've listened to it and written it all out.
Then we take that transcript, that,
that script to the interview
and return it to the narrator.
The reason that we do this is because again,
we wanted to evolve as much control,
as much power in the interview process to
the narrator as we can at every stage that we can.
And this goes back to the idea of, that.
This is a method that gives a lot of agency to
the people whose stories we're capturing.
You, especially being student interns
on a bigger project might not
feel like you have a lot of kind of
power or like seniority here.
But by virtue of being agents of the university,
agents of the wolf's was within
public humanities lab with books and were
sown in Estonian Public Humanities Lab.
You have a lot of institutional power behind you.
And so one of the things that we wanna do as
oral historians is take that power
and devolve it to transfer it to
the people whose stories we're working to capture it.
Because often this means working with people who
are historically and socially
marginalized in one or more ways.
And so it's important from
an ethical perspective for
us to do this as much as we can.
So we take that transcript
and we give it back to the narrator and say,
you read through this,
you take out anything that
you don't want to be a matter of
public record for any reason,
personal, professional, whatever.
Because I talked about my sister-in-law
and I want her to be able to see what I said about her.
Whatever.
We give them the opportunity
and the control over the transcript.
In that way. Very often people will say,
Yeah, this looks good, Perfect, fine.
Put it in the archive, and that's great.
But it is important that we have that layer of
protection for the narrator's
to determine how they want to be protected.
So after they've seen it, after they read it,
they will edit or redact or seal any portion
of it that they want to and then sign off on it.
And then at that point,
the transcript and whatever form that it is,
we'll go into the archive
along with the recording of the interview
and be available be made available to
the public under whatever terms the narrator has sent.
Again, in my experience,
generally narrators are like They look at it and say,
cool, fine, make it available, whatever.
But it is important that we give them
the opportunity to exercise
control over what is their life story, right?
I mean, that's the important thing to keep in mind here,
is that by virtue of doing oral history,
you're becoming the custodian or the steward,
or the channel by which
somebody story gets recorded and made available.
And so it's always good to keep that in mind so that you
can kinda keep the ethical imperatives
of that front of mind as well.
Hi, I'm Dan, dan Rawls.
I'm leaving this workshop.
Could you introduce yourself real quick?
Hi, my name is Dominic St. Victor.
I'm in the master's program
doing the public history check.
Great.
Welcome. So some of
the ways that we protect narrators in this way,
we use forums before
and after the interview to do a couple of things.
One before the interview is to communicate to
the narrator what their rights
are in the context of the interview.
Remember, you are representing
a powerful institution when you do,
when you do interviewing as an agent of FAQ.
And so we want to make sure
that narrator's understand that they
can do things like refused to answer questions,
stop the interview at any time.
One thing that I always write into my forms is like if
we get to the end of the interview and you decide,
I don't want any of that to be public record.
I will destroy the interview. Destroy the record.
It will never be transcribed. That's never
happened in all the interviewing that I've done.
It's important to have that as a kind of
like outlet or an option,
a fail-safe for narrators to feel comfortable,
just to feel comfortable to have that in
order to fully protect
them or protect them as much as possible.
So we use the consent form before the interview.
And again, that's something that you can go over during
the pre-interview and answer
any questions that they have.
And then we use a deed of gift
after the interview that clarifies,
Hey, these are your your rights to the material.
These are my rights to the material.
And basically, if you retain
a non-exclusive copyright to
the interview, that makes sense.
It's your life story.
It wouldn't make sense for me to like,
take that away from you as the interviewer,
have a right to it as well.
And so that's what allows you to then take a body of
interviews and transfer them to a library or archive.
It's important for the library or archive
often to have that documentations
that they feel comfortable making it
accessible to the public.
So again, what we're trying to do with these forums,
with the way that we approach the interview setting with
every stage of this process is to
take the power that we have as interviewers and
devolve it to the people
that we're interviewing, our narrators.
It's really important to understand,
however, what you can promise and what you cannot.
You cannot promise somebody for
anonymity and you cannot promise them legal protection.
So there's one very famous case in
which this came to the form.
That was a case that involved
Boston College where they had somebody who is
doing interviews with people who had been
active in at the time called the troubles in
Northern Ireland is a period of
very intense bloody political conflicts
between Irish nationalists and English royalists.
And so this was like in the '70s and '80s.
This is a period in which people were assassinated.
Had their homes or cars blown up,
like where people were murdered for political reasons.
And so after the Good Friday accords in the '90s,
the end of this violence,
there was an interest in going in and talking to people
who had been active perpetrators of that.
We can probably see why that would
be interesting to people.
Why we would want buy,
We just as people who want to know
more would want to do that.
The problem is that the person who is
doing the interviewing told the people
that they were interviewing told
their narrators, hey, we'll, she'll,
this material from, from any kind of public view,
really kind of access until you die so that you
won't be exposed to
legal liability for the things that you're telling us.
Well, they had no authority to actually
promise that that material
was subpoenaed successfully by the US government.
And baby, it was
the US government specifically
didn't successfully by some government.
It might've been the British government.
But the point is that they promised more than they could
deliver and put their narrators at risk.
As a result, obviously,
we don't want to do this.
So it's just important
to understand that you can tell it.
You can promise somebody confidentiality
not to use their real name.
I'll talk a little bit more about that in the next slide.
But you cannot promise somebody for anonymity.
They are giving you, by nature of doing the interview,
personally identifiable information,
whether or not they use their name.
And so again, thinking
ethically about how we do this kind of work,
you want to be attuned to when somebody is telling you
information that might put them at legal risk.
So just keep that in mind.
Again, not something that I expect it's going to come
up a lot or even.
If any, of your work. But it is important to
understand what you can promise and what you cannot.
So again, some things to know.
Consent can be given on camera.
So I talked the last slide
about using a consent form in order to
communicate somebody's rights and to have
them acknowledged that they understand those.
You can also do this on camera.
You're not always going to be interviewing
people who have a high level of
literacy or have a high enough level of literacy
to complete a consent form, and that's fine.
One of the strengths of oral history is that
we can capture a wider range of voices.
Printed archive can.
So it is fine for somebody to give consent on camera,
for you to read through the consent form and
then them to say, I consent.
Narrators can choose a pseudonym
or a false name for themselves.
This is fine. If you're doing this.
This is an instance,
another instance in which you might want to
use verbal consent on camera rather than a printed form.
So you just want to ask them, you know,
what do you want your pseudonym to be?
And I'll use that suited them for you.
Um, but again, anonymity
is not something that you can promise because by virtue,
by the very nature of
the interviewing, they are giving you,
identify personally identifiable information
that can be used to identify them later on.
So again, we can promise confidentiality.
We cannot promise for anonymity.
Anonymity meaning that nobody
will be able to find out who you are.
They probably will, at least to some degree.
And so the D to get from that
I mentioned in the last slide or two slides ago,
is one where the narrator can place
any kind of restrictions on access that they want.
Say, they're like, I don't want anybody to see this for
five years or ten years or
until I retire or until after I die,
they can put that stipulation on the deed of gift form.
And when it gets transferred to a library or archive,
library or archive will respect that and say, okay,
we're going to hold this, we're going to seal this until
such and such a date in accordance with their wishes.
So some steps to a successful interview.
Ask clear, inappropriate questions.
This is probably harder than because often,
especially when you start out interviewing,
you're gonna be nervous.
And you're probably going to ask a question that is like
fully a minute long and has like
three different questions within it.
You don't want to do that.
You want to ask one question at a time.
So it's really good ahead of
time to write out an interview guide.
A list of questions that you want to ask doesn't mean
that you go through that list of questions robotically.
Like you're doing a survey,
you want to have an intimate conversation with somebody.
You want to show that you are listening.
You want to respond to what they're telling you.
And so that means being flexible,
being responsive to what they're saying,
but also making sure that
you hit all the points that you want to hit.
So having your questions written out ahead
of time really helps along
these lines for you to ask
those questions that you know are going to
be clearly worded by appropriate.
I mean, if you have
a really good rapport established with the narrator,
where you feel like you can ask
them more personal questions.
Are they open up that space for
you to ask them
about more personal aspects of their life.
Go ahead and do so.
But read the room. Like read what their energy is,
what they seem willing to talk about, what they don't.
They can always decline to answer a question.
But you just want to be sensitive in
interview context to what they seem open to.
It's important to listen to the narrator.
That might seem obvious.
But again, it can be easy if you
have your interview guide written not to just go through
those questions because it's a thing that
you have to fall back on.
Really good interviewers, though.
We'll make the narrator
forget that they're being interviewed,
will make it feel more like a conversation.
That doesn't mean that you spend a lot of time talking.
Actually, you should spend probably 95% or
more of the time listening to the other person.
Because we're not here to record yourself.
We're here to record their story, right?
So it's all about learning to ask those good,
open-ended questions that get
somebody talking and keeps them talking.
And then when they stop talking,
I use the rule that I also use in teaching.
Which is when you ask a question,
wait 7 s before you follow up.
Because when we're asking a question, right.
So like I asked you a question,
you have to hear the question,
process the question and your brain,
formulate a response, and then articulate that response.
And that's actually like kind of a lengthy process.
But we, as part
of human nature or social conditioning, I'm not sure.
Whatever.
We don't like to hear, silence, right?
It kinda makes you nervous and you want to fill
that silence with another question
or some were talking
because you're nervous and that's fine.
So after asking you a question,
you might count in your head
1234567, before following up.
And same thing when somebody gets to
what sounds like the end of a story,
I like leaves him dead space there.
Because they might be hesitating
or whatever or something just
might be churning in their brain.
That comes out and then is really interesting.
And if you step on that by talking,
you might miss something.
I'll never know that you must listen to
the narrator and don't be afraid of that dead air.
It takes nothing away from you.
It might make you feel nervous, but it
takes nothing away from you.
And it might actually lead you to really, really good,
some really good nugget of information or
a fantastic story that
is going to make your research so much richer.
Again, it's very important to be given narrators
this base to talk and recollect.
Sometimes people will ask, well what did,
what did they do off-topic and the general responses,
there is no off-topic. Your history.
You don't really get to decide what is on and off topic.
And maybe more or less interesting to you.
But it's gooey indistinct of that.
And very possibly it'll be interesting to
somebody else who may access the interview there.
So again, devolving power in interview contexts.
This is one another way that we do it.
By putting narrators in the driver's seat.
We are creating the space for
them to talk and recollects.
We're not directing the conversation in
any other way than asking good open-ended questions.
And then when they did,
had given him very long response
as some good follow-up questions.
Like that's another way that you
showed that you are listening and
engaged is by asking them about what they just told you,
rather than necessarily moving on
to the next question in an interview guide.
So again, pay attention to nonverbal cues.
This can be signs of discomfort,
signs of being tired,
especially with older narrators.
You want to pay attention to what somebody's
energy level is like
to make sure that you're not over taxing them.
You can always put an interview out
across multiple days if you have to.
Just pay attention to where people are
at in the interview contexts.
Whether that means, you know, anxiety, discomfort,
tiredness, whatever the attuned
to what's going on with them as much as you can.
And then again, asking good follow-up questions.
This is really a skill that you develop over time.
I hope that I'm better at it now than I
was when I started doing interviews.
But it's something that you want to keep in mind,
but also something that you will get better at.
The Moore interviewing that you do.
Some quick tips for according test.
You test your equipment beforehand,
make sure you know how to use it.
Do like a short drive
around so that you know how your mic works,
how your camera works, however together,
what kind of settings you need to have.
You want to find a quiet space where
the narrator is comfortable.
So I always warn people against interviewing outside.
When I interview anybody in a coffee shop,
I went to intervene in the new restaurant
or bar anywhere that
you have a lot of background noise going on?
I would just say that in general,
if there's a if there's a situation where
that's really important are appropriate for your project,
then obviously that could change.
But you want to think about the quality of the recording,
not only for people down the line,
but just so that you can actually listen to it
and transcribe it after the recording is done.
When I'm talking about interviewing people,
generally it's like they have a lot later maker,
I use mostly lot of interaction.
Think of a library we use that later, mixer, lapel banks.
So if you're doing that, you want to watch out for
jewelry and clothing like scarves.
And you want to monitor your sound.
So if you have a,
if you're using a video camera to record,
there's always a headphone jack.
Have a pair of headphones, plugged
them and keep them in during the interviews,
you can listen to the audio is
actually going into your recording device.
And that's where we'll pick up a battery dying,
a maintenance, malfunctioning, or a problem like this.
It's like making a lot of noise or a scarf.
It's like rubbing against
the standing for a bad coordinate.
Monitors, headphones,
and then be aware of harsh lighting or,
and, or changing length.
I'll confess, lighting is something that
I still really struggle with.
I don't certainly don't see
anybody in front of a break window, which I've done.
I generally recommend against
using like just natural light in an interview.
I had wanted to do it so long that
like 5 h and
the sunlight pretty much sat like during the interview.
So by the end of the interview,
the guy had like venetian
blind like stripes going across his chest
because the sun was coming in through
the window creating a head shadow across him.
But I don't want to stop him because he
was really on a roll.
So just think about your lighting.
Kinda like people in a way that is flattering to them.
And this is assuming of course that you're
doing or doing video recording.
We're doing all the audio recorder
you don't have to think about,
but aside from maybe being able to
see the other great thing.