Blogging the project

I would like to welcome one of our DRC apprentices to the heritage project. Sarah is a deaf person and she has expressed an interest in supporting me on the project so I am meeting her tomorrow morning to discuss her support. I hope she is not going to live to regret offering to work wih me as one of the first tasks I have for her is to help me organise the disability history archive which is currently located in the far end of a long office where no one can fully access it, let alone make sense of what is there already from our previous HLF funded project.

Sarah and I have also spoken about involving her in doing some interviews with older deaf people using BSL interpretation. We need to give some thought as to how we will do this and what technology will be involved, for instance, I am wondering if we should set up two digital film cameras on tripods, one to record Sarah and one to record the interviewee, and then transcribe the interviews into text format at a later stage whilst also publishing the original BSL based conversations, maybe with sub titles or a recorded audio track of the spoken word. So the opposite way around from the way BSL is usually added to audio-visual format for television. 

So this is potentially very exciting, a bit experimental in terms of the technology at my end, though I am certain will generate some fascinating oral history material and may be quite innovative outside of deaf people's organisations.