WRD 112: Section 20
Professor Fernheimer
Spring 2019
Final Projects 3 and 4 Overview: Going Public with Oral History
The Daily Grind Overview
Working in teams of 3-5 you will produce a 10-15 minute “This American Life” or “Radiolab” style audio essay. Initially, you will work as a group to discuss the interviews you worked on during the semester, decide on some themes/ideas/issues that they touch upon and that you will research together, decide on a target audience (or audiences) for your audiocast/video, strategize how to frame them in a cohesive way, and create a schedule and series of task assignments for group members. In order to produce this collaborative work, you will work together on several smaller steps.
First you will further divide into smaller groups within your whole team. Each smaller group of 2-3 will work together to create questions and conduct an original oral history interview(there will be a separate assignment prompt for this portion), an annotated bibliography, and write individual reflective essays on this process. Once each smaller team has completed annotated bibliographies, you will work as a whole team to create the collaborative final project (audiocast or video).
At two points in the project, you will turn in reflective essays—after conducting the oral history interview/drafting the annotated bibliography essay and at the end of the project. These essays will reflect on the process of transforming audio interview into narrative story, researching historical context, working with a partner or two to conduct an oral history interview, and working with others to make these stories publicly accessible.
These two major assignments are worth 50% of your final grade for this class, distributed in the following ways.
- Oral History Interview Collection 20% (10% Interview/questions, 5% collaboration, 5% reflection 3-4 pages)
- Collaborative Oral-History Based Final Project (either audiocast or short video documentary) 30% [(Team Contract/Plan (5%), Annotated Bibliography/Research (5%), Draft Script 5%, Rough and Final Cut10%, Final Reflection Essay (5%)]
Timetables:
2/12 Final Projects 3 and 4 Overview Introduced
2/28 Speed-teaming, for teams for final projects
Project 3: Conducting Original Oral History Interview and Research
3/7 Introduction to Primary Research with Sarah Dorpinghaus, Annotated Bibliography Assignment Prompt Distributed
(meet in UKSCRC King Library) Great Hall, 2nd floor of the Special Collections side of the Margaret I. King Building. There are directions here:
http://libguides.uky.edu/SCbasics
3/19 Using UK Libraries Workshop (TBD); Interviewees selected, contacted, scheduled
3/21 Interview Protocol Questions due–How-to Interviewing Workshop
4/4 Interviews, Release forms, Photos, and Reflective Essays Due to Dr. Jan and Kopana Terry
*Note each team will work with their interviewee to schedule a time convenient for all sometime between 3/7- 4/4. The Nunn Center Studio is open during spring break and that might be a great time to conduct your interview.
Project 4: Presenting Oral History
3/26 Writing Workshop: Turning Interviews Into Story
3/28 Workday–Learning Audacity/Editing/Interviewing
4/2 Annotated Bibliographies Due
4/9 Scripts Due/Peer Review
4/11 Instructor Feedback Distributed
4/16 Work day
4/18 Rough Cuts Due/Peer Review
4/23 Final Project Presentations Practice
4/25 Kentucky Jewish History Symposium in Niles Gallery (Final Public Presentations)
4/30 Final Cuts, Final Reflective Essays, Final Indexes and Summaries Due by noon
This project is worth 55% of your total grade for the course broken up in these ways:
- Oral History Interview Collection 20% (10% Interview/questions, 5% collaboration, 5% reflection 3-4 pages)
- Collaborative Oral-History Based Final Project (either audiocast or short video documentary) 30% [(Team Contract/Plan (5%), Annotated Bibliography/Research (5%), Draft Transcript 5%, Rough Cut 10%, research Reflection (5%)]
- Final Team Oral Presentation 5%
The Rationale
We’ve been working with these oral history materials all semester, and though they are fascinating in and of themselves, they will reach a much broader audience if you can interpret them to tell a story. Now that you’ve both indexed and rhetorically analyzed them, your job in this assignment is to work with your team to create a compelling narrative that features them. Your team will work to deepen a public audience’s understanding of the interviews by carefully combining them both with other interviews and with the narrative segues and historical context that will make them into a cohesive story. Though they appear to you “out of context,” your job is to work with your team to enable a broader audience to make sense of them by putting them in context. This is no easy feat, so I’ve broken it into several smaller, more manageable chunks, as indicated by the time-table above and the “nitty gritty” below. The important skills you’re working to develop in this project are research, collaboration, and synthesis for a specific, public audience.
The Nitty Gritty
Your first step will be to think about the things that make your interview interesting and think about the larger stories it participates in. To help you identify team members, you will have a chance to “showcase” your interview and listen to your colleagues’ in some “speed-teaming” style mixers. Once you form teams of 3-5, together your group will create a work-plan to help you complete the necessary research and composing for your final project. Your next step will be to research and write your 2-3 person-authored annotative bibliography based on the oral histories you indexed and the original oral history interview you conducted, placing them in a broader context that reflects the theme or idea that your group has chosen to explore in the podcast. (More specific instructions for completing these smaller group assignments under Project 3: Original Oral History Interview). Once you’ve completed your original oral history interview and your annotated bibliographies, you will work with your larger group to create a cohesive radio show or short video. To complete this task successfully, your group will write a title for your podcast, a short introduction to your show, short transitions between the pieces in the show, and a conclusion to your show. You will be allowed some class time for the planning, but should use this time to create a schedule of deadlines for these parts of the assignment and divide up the labor evenly between team members.
You will download Audacity (it’s free!) http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/ onto your computer and use it to record and edit your audio essays. The podcasts will incorporate sound bytes from the interview as well as other sound effects that add depth, dimension, affect, or comic relief to your stories.
Tips for Getting Started (Invention!)
Since you’re likely pretty familiar (and in fact a resident expert!) on the interview assigned to you, you may already know how you want to approach this project and which aspects of historical context you wish to research. I suggest that you read through and complete the Project Speed-Date hand-out and that you read through and think about the questions raised by the “Turning Interview Into Story Hand-out” (available on Canvas). We will formally complete this exercise later in the semester, once you’ve done some research, but you may find it helpful in shaping the way you approach your research. Since you all have listened to more than one interview from the Nunn Center’s Jewish collections, feel free to choose which one you want to focus on for these final projects.
Your interview will be assigned from following list:
Ethnicity in Lexington (Multi-Culturality) Oral History Project
http://www.kentuckyoralhistory.org/interviews/20584
Lexington Jewish Community Oral History Project
http://www.kentuckyoralhistory.org/collections/lexington-jewish-community-oral-history-project
JHFE Jewish Kentucky Oral History Collection
https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/catalog/xt72ng4gqc3f
Research
Since a large part of this assignment depends on the strength of the contextualizing research you complete, you might begin to investigate the following resources put together by Sarah Dorpinghaus in Special Collections
https://docs.google.com/document/d/10n5l4zvDML2-XookWCGCiLoVDdvqylJQJKlWVo2Bneo/edit?usp=sharing
MLA conventions to follow for your Works Cited:
Course home page:
Kirkpatrick, Judith. American Literature Online. Course home page. Jan.-May 2003. Dept. of English. Kapi’olani CC. 21 Feb. 2003.< http://www2.hawaii.edu/~kirkpatr/s03>.
(From Faigley’s The Brief Penguin Handbook, Second Edition, p.279)
Publication by a Group or Organization:
“State of the Birds, USA 2004.” Audubon. 2004. National Audubon Society. 19 Nov. 2004
<http://www.audubon.org/bird/stateofthebirds/>.
(From Faigley’s The Brief Penguin Handbook, Second Edition, p.274)
In general you should always include the
Name of the author. “The Title of the article or part of the website you looked at.” The name of
The publication or the site on which the part you looked at is located. The date of the
Publication. The date you accessed the site.
http: The URL for the site enclosed in brackets—copy it exactly–copy and paste>
Our Textbook
Oral History Interview
Fred Fugazzi. Interview with Ronald F. White. Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History. July 17,
- Digital. http://www.kentuckyoralhistory.org/interviews/19708. 10 September 2013.