Blogging the Project - a visit to the Birmingham Deaf Cultural Centre

This morning Sarah and I went to visit a club for older deaf people run by BID (Birmingham Services for Deaf People).

Sarah is a deaf person herself and is an apprentice at DRC who has offered to support us to carry out some heritage interviews with older deaf people.

Initially my thinking was to take a camcorder (Flip camera) and a tripod and set it up to film an interpreter using BSL to talk to people about their memories. Sarah had contacted staff at BID who run the group for older deaf people, but we weren't quite sure what to expect, for instance how many people would be there, what support there might be, whether people would be willing to be interviewed and what was the format of their activities (i.e. would we be intruding on the bingo?) 

We therefore decided not to be over ambitious on our first visit and we took along a list of questions which Sarah had devised and the hand held digital Edirol audio recorder. My thinking was for Sarah to ask questions in BSL and then I would record the BSL interpreter onto the audio recorder.

This turned out to be the best policy as the group were mainly preoccupied with eating their lunch in the restaurant. Unfortunately there were no electrical sockets to plug in the Edirol and I had broken rule number one of oral history recordings and forgotten to bring batteries!

So some tactful negotiation had to be done to persuade people to come with us to the reception area to record an interview. In the event a very nice gentleman named Clive came and gave Sarah a lovely interview about his childhood and early life. Sarah asked him some very insightful questions about whether things have changed.

Back in the restaurant it seemed that a number of ladies were starting to chat about their early lives as deaf people but seemed reluctant to be properly interviewed, so we decided to leave it for this week and perhaps give people more time to consider their involvement.

On the way out, a lady on reception gave us a newspaper cutting about Gem Street Deaf School in the 1930s which she had popped into the Deaf Cultural Centre recently with her contact details. This is very exciting and I will contact the person to see if Sarah and I can go and interview them. If we have an open door then we may as well give it a little push.

Blogging the project - an interview with Robert Mottram

With summer holidays out of the way and already half way through September, I felt it was time to get our teeth into carrying out some oral history interviews. I have a few people lined up but wanted to start with someone I already know well in order to hit the ground running.

I therefore contacted a former work colleague, Robert Mottram, a disabled person since childhood and for nearly two decades a disability equality trainer in the West Midlands which included working for two of the region's leading disabled person's organisations, Disability West Midlands and Coventry & Warwickshire Council of Disabled People.

Robert agreed to me visiting him at his home in Leamington Spa to conduct the interview. I briefed Robert on the telephone about what we are looking for within the HLF project so we were both very confident about how the interview would go. This was a rare occasion where I didn't even think written notes or questions were required as I know Robert so well and did not expect any moments where either of us would be stuck for words.

Unfortunately I did not have use of the car yesterday so it was a very long ride from Birmingham to Leamington on a 50cc scooter via the scenic route as I'm not allowed on the motorway on a moped, with my camera and recording equipment safely tucked away. This is the beauty of using small hand held digital recorder's, I'm using an Edirol which is a few years old but still gives perfect clarity in a digital format. 

Before carrying out an interview its always worth checking out equipment to make sure everything is working and there's enough memory space. So before I left for Leamington some time was spent testing the sound levels and clearing some memory from an existing memory stick. A 2G memory stick provides plenty of space for recording, so I divided the interview into little sections of about 5 minutes.

It is always worth explaining the techie side of things to the interviewee before you start so they know why you are stopping and starting the conversation. Its about waiting for a natural end in the person's answer to a question; or a point at which they naturally hesitate. A slight hand gesture also let's them know you are going to click the stop button and the break of a few seconds often allows both parties to compose their thoughts for the next question. A break was also prompted at one point when Robert's personal assistant Roberta came through the front door, though in fairness she had been advised in advance that we may be recording so was very quiet and unobtrusive.

Towards the end of the interview, between recordings I asked Robert if there was anything he wanted to talk about that we had so far missed and this proved useful as there were a couple of issues he wanted to expand upon.

The final point I want to make as a tip to would-be interviewers was that I took some little ear plugs with me so that I could test the sound levels prior to the interview starting. This was very useful to do as you then don't have that constant worry in the back of your mind "is this going to sound ok?" You don't have to keep the ear plugs in during the interview, you can just keep one in or pop one in every now and then just to check everything is still clear and audible (we men are good at multi tasking too!). But it does help to make a good recording if you are prepared in advance.

Got a bit lost riding home and ended up going towards Stratford. Not too much of a trauma on a pleasant September evening riding my retro scooter through the lush south Warwickshire countryside. I could definitely do this for a living!