Maria Erskin talked us through a basic plan of what the Trent to Trenches exhibition will look like, it looks really exciting and sounds like there is lots of room for Illuminate to play with. Then Vanessa talked to us about interview techniques and we tried out some questioning methods, we found that closed questions, ones that give a yes or no answer, were quite restrictive and the interviewee can get frustrated because they feel they can't elaborate on their answer. We found that asking about someones feelings, like how did that make you feel or how do you think your mother felt telling you that, gave us some more detailed and sometimes surprising results. If a question was directly followed by another question it could confuse the interviewee or it could lead them to answer the question in a certain way. We tried a few spontaneous follow up questions and found out that you should not try and second guess what the participant was going to say, they could say something totally different! We also learnt that we should be clear on what it is we want to learn from the person we are interviewing so that we can ask some specific questions. We discussed that it might be useful to let the interviewee chat first about the story they want to tell and rehearse it a little before recording so that they can get across everything they want to convey.
We also talked about metadata which is what we might record for our records such as the persons name, the interviewers name, the date, what project it is for etc. Also important to consider are the ethical implications of the recordings and how we must inform the people taking part what the data will be used for and ask them to sign consent forms after the interview when they have had a chance to listen back to their interviews and tell us if they are unhappy with anything they have said.
Helen