Interviewing

The art and technique of eliciting stories from others

How can I help you with your resolutions for 2010?

Happy 2010 to you. My biggest resolution is to help you with your New Year’s resolutions, especially if yours take the form of saying “I really ought to talk to my…” Mom or Dad or Grandpa or Grandma or Aunt or Uncle or family friend. And record that conversation. And then process it with your computer. And then archive it somehow.

In 2010, I wish to to devote more time and effort to this site than I did the last year, and here’s a toast to the posts, articles, reviews and videos that will appear here this year. I’m leery of getting too specific and too ambitious. (Been there, done that.) What can I write about that will help you?

On my own work with my own family oral histories, I have recordings of my dad and uncle—both veterans—that I want... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Do it: Learn How • Do it: Yourself • Interviewing • Personal
(1) Comments • Permalink

Essential Tips for Interviewing family: Thou shalt not interrupt

Do you want to interview parents or grandparents over the holidays? Here are some tips from Jens Lund — whom I met at the Oral History Association conference in Louisville this fall. As I see it, the problem for the family member interviewer is lack of experience conducting interviews. What one piece of advice would Lund, an experienced folklorist, give to the first time interviewer?

Jens (pronounced yens) Lund, from Washington state, pioneered aspects of creating the driving audio tour. Put in a cassette (this was a while ago, people) at a certain location on a road, drive and play. The tape tells you about what you’re seeing, with significant history and interviews with people from the area. There may be music from local people as well.

Here’s what he had to say:

Don’t interrupt. Give the person enough time. Don’t cut them off. Don’t... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Interviewing
(0) Comments • Permalink

Photography changes what we remember

This 3.5 minute video (direct YouTube link; embedded below) is an interview with Hugh Talman, a photographer with the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. He muses on his act of photographing the aftermath of Katrina. The curator who was planning to visit the area asked him, “What would you photograph?” His reply: “you’d photograph the evidence of the power of Katrina. I don’t style myself as photojournalist, but it turned into having photojournalistic aspects to it.” The video shows some of his photos. Most striking: photographs of an object where it was found (in its full post-Katrina context), versus the object photographed the way Talman normally works with objects, shot in the sanitized setting of a photo studio. What a contrast.

Before I watched the video (and saw just its name—“changes what we remember”), I thought, “Oh, this might relate to photos and memories and how to use photos to nudge or direct memories.” Not so pointed as that. It’s more that a collection of photographs is a kind of memory artifact of how it was. The contrast between an object’s plain (studio) background versus that object in its environment so powerfully conveys the power of Katrina. The two photos of the same object may as well be two different objects. I’m inspired to hunt more carefully when I look at old photographs for objects and their contexts, and the clues they might provide about a person or a time. I’m thinking primarily about old family albums, but the same approach can be applied to any historical photograph collection.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • History • Interviewing • Photographs
(0) Comments • Permalink

Recording Memories before They Slip Away Completely

Mementos Help preserve memories. From the Mayo Clinic’s suggestions for helping people with Alzheimer’s cope with the disease. “Alzheimer’s steals away memories, but tangible mementos can help people remember their past.” [via Storycatching, by Pat McNees]

This is a counterpoint to the stance I took during the Q&A article, “I want to interview my parents. Does that mean I think they’re at death’s door?” In the Q&A, I assumed from the questioner’s age that his parents were in good health. But there are those whose parents are not in good heath, and Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia come and steal away what this article calls the tapestry woven from the memories of events in a... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Interviewing • Personal History
(2) Comments • Permalink

LIFE magazine photo archive now searchable on Google

LIFE photo archive hosted on the web by Google. Photos go back to the 1860s, and sketches & etchings go back to the 1750s. Wow! Here’s the Google blog post about it. There goes the afternoon. I’ve already found an interesting railroad set. There goes the afternoon! [via Lifehacker]

Not only is this cool, but it’s a good thing to poke through if you’re going to sit down and interview someone. It’s better to get some research in about the time and place where your interviewee lived. What was it like in 1950s? What about such-n-such events? Spending time in collections such as this helps to take you, the questioner, there, and ask better questions of your interviewee.. I’ve been thinking about online repositories of supporting information

P.S. Southern Pacific Rail Road. Dispatcher, perhaps? That was my grandfather’s job and employer

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • History • Interviewing • Photographs
(0) Comments • Permalink

Shades of the Departed Guest Blog

Hooray for Footnote Maven, who invited me to guest blog at Shades of the Departed. My post is about interviewing people about photo albums. Why photos rock, and what sorts of practical things you can do during an interview. You may already be a winner! Read the entry to find out why. (I certainly won-in a slightly different way. Thanks to fM for the nudge to write that post. If it weren’t for that deadline, I might’ve waited a little while longer before blogging here again.)

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Interviewing • Memorabilia • Personal History • Photographs
(0) Comments • Permalink

Family Health Care Time Space Continuum

Another long break. I’m back. (I think.) You know, I talk here of recording family histories, or family stories, but since April I’ve been in a slightly different mode: family medical history. It’s not from long ago; it’s current. And, depending on events (which included nearly 3 weeks of hospitalization or skilled nursing facility-ization), I find myself leaving the land of so-called normal to a different mindset— the health care time-space continuum. That place is highly absorbing, but it’s nothing I wish to talk about here. Hence the silence. (But the patient is home again, which is a nice improvement.)

I suppose if I were to relate it to the topic at hand—recording and preserving family stories—I have two things to say:

Though I have been around family members quite a bit, I find myself with zero interest in doing any interviewing. (well, one channel of my lovely stereo microphone went kaput and I haven’t had the energy or the inclination to even begin troubleshooting it beyond confirming that yes, there’s no incoming signal from the one mic.) No interest.... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Housekeeping • Interviewing • Personal History
(0) Comments • Permalink

Holiday visits: Witness to an Interview

Photo albums are a thing of beauty. I got to witness an oral history interview about a photo album on my Christmas holiday travels. I was the silent third party, operating the equipment, and asking the occasional question to pull out a few more details. Son brings Father a photo album, put together by Son’s Mother. The album was discovered after Mother’s death. It covers the time in Mother’s and Father’s early life together, before the kids were born, and before the Mother and Father’s divorce. Father is the only one alive who can describe what’s going on in the photos. Here are a few observations I made about interviewing with photo albums.

Photos are a fabulous memory trigger. When sparking a conversation about someone’s recollections, how do you get to the well of memories inside a person’s mind? Questions may trigger… they are words to tap that well, but that recollection-well still resides inside the person’s mind. Pictures are external triggers. They bring back the memories for the interviewee. Plus, being external, the interviewer can make his or her own observations about what’s in the picture, and use them to elicit more... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Interviewing • Memorabilia • Photographs
(3) Comments • Permalink

Daria’s first interview

Daria tells about her first interview experience. She found this website, learned about (and then bought) a Zoom H2 Handy recorder, and told me how it worked out. I asked her some more questions. She answered them. Read all about it.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Interviewing
(0) Comments • Permalink

Yearning and Family History (from the Oral History Assn conference)

“Yearning,” she called it. Yearning. Her word leapt at me with all the force of being the right, true, word describing what’s within me. Her story: An experienced oral history interviewer visits a distant family member and is very quickly drawn into a story of trauma, of holocaust, of fractured families. The Q & A brought forth uncanny connections between her story, and other stories of fracturing, family, holocaust and slavery.

The panel at the Oral History Association conference in Oakland was called Community and Individual Memory. One presentation, about how the City of Fremont celebrated its 50th anniversary, is worth its own short post. This post is about a presentation by Rina Benmayor,  on yearning and family interviewing.

Benmayor is one of the founders and directors of the CSUMB  Oral History and Community Memory Institute and Archive. She’s an experienced oral history interviewer. In her presentation, she describes how, after... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Interviewing • Oral Historians • Personal History
(1) Comments • Permalink

A PodCamp SoCal report

Audio gadgets, workflows, meeting people, and stories. PodcampSoCal was a good day yesterday. I was expecting to have different breakout regions in the room, but we all followed a single track together as one room. I saw several Zoom Handy H2s set up on small tripods, recording the proceedings. And one or two Zoom H4, too. Looks like I’ll be turning from The War and what’s your story to an audio geek gadget maven for the next day or so. The agenda was full and continuous I didn’t get a chance to ask people what their experience was like using their various recorders. But I’ll be at the show Friday and Saturday, so I hope to do that then.

Oh, and family stories did come up; I managed to get myself on the agenda at day’s end and spoke of the Veterans History Project. One guy, Dan Bach (he produces a math show and wore a tee shirt filled with lovely graphic symbolic goodness related to prime numbers), mentioned his dad during the Q & A: A WWII vet, a prisoner of war who received his purple heart 60-some years later. Perhaps I heard about him in the news?... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Audio • Audio: Hardware • Interviewing • Veterans History Project
(0) Comments • Permalink

Liar, liar!

Larry Lehmer talks about Liars. Or stretchers of truths. Fabulists (not to be confused with fabulous, or its shorter cousin, faboo). His post points to a faboo post about a fibbing Mom. Ann Hagman Cardinal tells her uncle a story her Mom had told her, and he —with other family members present — tells her the truth. That conversation sets her on her path as writer and storyteller.

I just stared at him, heat rising from my chest to my face.

Finally I sputtered, “What? Mom made it all up?” I began to recount the other stories she had told me. One after another, they were confirmed to be fiction. I was furious. Beyond furious. How could my mother feed me these lies year after year? And I believed her! I could just see her talking to me over her shoulder in the VW van, her self-righteous lecture... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Interviewing • Personal History
(1) Comments • Permalink

Some thoughts about interviewing my Dad

I want the post of my Dad’s story to stand on its own, and reflect on the interview process, here, separately. The thought which looms so large over any other: An interview is probably the single most concentrated way to bring out a ton of “I never knew that” revelations. Especially if the interviewee is a parent. It’s one surprise after another about a person whom I’ve known all my life.

I suppose if I were to look at it statistically, the concentration of surprises per time spent would be pretty dense. In a 2.5 hour conversation, I heard, oh, 8 to 10 “wow!” things. So that comes out to 1 shocker per 15 minutes of interview. YMMV. (My shocker ratio could be way off; when I transcribed the portion I included in the last post, I didn’t listen to the entire interview, so my “Total Surprises = N” count is... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Do it: Yourself • Interviewing
(2) Comments • Permalink

Have a video iPod? Get a Belkin TuneTalk

I got to try out the Belkin TuneTalk stereo microphone for the iPod video (and 2nd generation iPod Nano) at BarcampLA3 this last weekend. If you have an iPod video, then seriously consider getting this $70 microphone for recording interviews.

Older iPods (starting from 3rd Generation) include the ability to record Voice Memos, with a separate microphone attachment. The recording quality, though, was crappy—the same as what you hear on the phone. With the Video iPod, the Voice Memo recording ability got highly revamped from crappy to good. (Crappy = 8 kHz mono—phone call; good = Stereo CD quality: 16 bit 44.1kHz).

Voice memos are pretty easy to record, so you get portability and ease of use with high quality... Read More

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Audio • Audio: Hardware • Interviewing
(2) Comments • Permalink

Three brief thoughts on listening

I interviewed my dad last weekend. Interviewing is listening. Listening takes energy. I’ve learned that I need to consider my own energy level — and the energy level of the interviewee when I plan and do the interview. Afterwards, I’m pooped, especially if an interview comes in context of a family visit, which includes travel, setting up, interview, socializing, travel home.

I ran across two “listening” thoughts recently.

Listening is a lost art. “People aren’t really listening, they waiting for their turn to talk.  Or they’re formulating their talking points while someone else is talking.” Oral history is a cure for this. Or, if not a cure, a way to discover and battle those (”Well—” and “But—”) tendencies within yourself. One upside: You get to choose the topic that the other person talks about. Which, depending on the chit-chat tendencies of the person you’re interviewing, can be A Very Good Thing.

You don’t learn very much when you yourself are talking. That was one person’s highlight from a podcast interview held with Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, The context was business, but this came from Schmidt’s experience teaching a class at Stanford, and hearing quetions from students. Keeps him fresh. Worthwhile perspective on many levels.

Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in • Interviewing
(0) Comments • Permalink