For our Oral History we interviewed Janine Strugis, a junior at Rowan University. The interview took place in the library, surrounded by maybe one or two other people. Janine did not want to be recorded in any form, so we took copious notes on everything that was said. Before going into the interview, we knew that Janine was a vegetarian, and with that fact, we determined to center our questions on organic foods. We held a high interest in what organic foods were and whether or not they were healthy for you, or if they were in fact healthier than non-organic foods. With that, we thought Janine would be a perfect candidate. But after the interview began, we found it hard to incorporate our organic food questions, and found ourselves asking questions that centered around the fact that she is a vegetarian and partial vegan. When we learned that she was a partial vegan, the interview turned more in another direction, since the two of us conducting the interview had no idea what a vegan was, but had heard of the term. And when the organic questions came around, we felt as though they were merely brushed over, forced, and we instantly flipped our attention back to Janine’s eating habits and lifestyle.

    The technologies that I am planning to use for the final project that are new to me aren’t really new for me. MY group has decided to do the paper option rather than the documentary so most of our project will be written as we did our interview through a transcript type of method. To do this we did have to use a computer to keep up with every single word that was spoken between the interviewer and interviewee. What really prompted our group to go the paper route instead of the video or audio method when doing our report was the interviewee. She/he did not seem too thrilled about being videotaped so before we met we offered to do it in an audio type method where we would just ask her/him questions and record her answers.
    When the day finally came to do the interview the interviewee seemed very nervous at the thought of having his/her voice recorded as she/he was afraid they would sound weird or it would not work as we wanted. If the documentary had been required for this project we probably would not have been able to use the same subject for interviewing as they did not feel comfortable with either the video or audio method. We would then have to scour the earth trying to find another person that has some sort of relation with our research subject. Also if the documentary had been required I would have felt a lot more pressure about finding someone who really has a field of expertise on what our research is relating to. Finding someone like this in the amount of time we were given would probably be an incredibly frustrating task because we really wouldn’t know where to start.