So far the most difficult part of the oral history process is getting people to respond with a time that they would like to do the interview. Despite starting this internship at the beginning of June it was only the very last week of June when I finally got to record my first oral histories.
I interviewed Wally Stronski, a drag racer from the 50’s/60’s, and Larry Holbert, whose brother and father were sportscar racers. Overall, the interviews went pretty well and it was really interesting to hear their stories. Both of my interviewees also had several bits of racing memorabilia that would potentially be used for the exhibit.
While I am waiting for more people to respond to my email I have begun the next step of the oral history process—transcription. While transcription is not particularly difficult it requires a lot of concentration and it can get kind of tedious. However, as I was transcribing the recordings I was able to see where I could make improvements in my interview technique.
My goal for these interviews is to make them feel like more like conversations where the interviewee really opens up and talks about the given subject. One way to do this would be to work on my follow-up questions. While I did ask several follow-up questions, at times I jumped too quickly away from something that the interviewee probably would have talked more about.
I definitely want to order my questions a little better because it would be helpful to have a clearer direction instead of jumping around so much. For example, I noticed in one of my interviews that I brought up one specific subject early on in the interview and then came back to the subject with a similar question at the end. I had forgotten about the second question until the end of the interview and if they had been grouped together, it may have helped the interview to flow better.
I am happy to have gotten the first set of oral histories done and I hope that the next few go even smoother now that I have had time to analyze my methods.