In the past seven weeks we have accomplished so much work! We have currently completed 38 interviews ranging from around 10 minutes to over an hour and plan to get at least 11 (including the ones of ourselves) more done in the remaining two weeks. Our initial goal for our collection was to verbally and visually represent the theme of displacement during COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on how physical and/or emotional separation has affected many Carleton Students and we have largely done this through our set of interviews and some pictures. This also ties into the larger goals of the Plague Year archive as one of their expressed intentions was to share “both traumatic and dislocating moments in this year of the pandemic” as well as those “moments of unexpected joy.” We have questions that have elicited both from our interviewees and we have done it primarily through a somewhat audio history format which was one of the suggested ways to share stories.
Through our interviews, we have tried to get as many voices as we can though the large majority of them have ended up being in some way connected to one of the three of us because those are the interviews that ended up being both easiest to set up due to limited time and access. We did, however, also reach out through the class pages on Facebook to see who was interested in sharing their story. We got 19 responses and while not every one panned out into an interview, this did give us a few interviews with people we otherwise had no connection with. It was also very encouraging to see the enthusiastic response from our peers and their willingness to support the historical record.
Moving forward we are hoping to start wrapping up our interviews and beginning the process of curation. We will still upload most of the full interviews (unless there was a reason to cut them or make them transcription or audio only) onto the archive, but we also want to use pieces of them to make an easily digestible and shareable exhibit. Our game plan is that we will complete all of our interviews by the end of the 8th week, and then we will conduct the inter-group reflection interviews at the beginning of the 9th week. After these are completed, our main focus will be on creating the exhibit, and selecting parts of interviews to present.
You have made wonderful progress in seven weeks, and I think the Carleton archives will be deeply enriched by these interviews. Let’s find time this week for a group meeting when we can talk through the logistics of the final exhibit, in case you want to do some video-editing.