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.
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.
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