Ari and Grace's mini-Oral!

Ari: I volunteered to be interviewed since I brought a large portion of my archive to school with me. I've been keeping a stack of journals, letters, photographs, and important family items since I was eight or nine years old. That being said, it was a natural choice for Grace to assume the position of the interviewer, and me, the interviewee. 

Because we scanned my archive first, Grace and I decided to try to pick questions from the review sheet that related to some of the items I chose. I incorporated items from my Jewish and Italian cultural heritages, my queer identity,  and notes from a high school diversity conference called Student Diversity Leadership Conference (SDLC) which I attended my Junior and Senior years of high school. Since I had a wide range of archive items, it was easy to relate the interview questions to them. From the CPMR question sheet we picked questions revolving discovering sexism, inspirations for my current activism at the University of Michigan, my early childhood, and my experiences in a same-gender school. Of course, these questions were tweaked during the interview process and Grace added her own spins as we went along. She did a wonderful job asking probing questions to obtain more detail as we went along. The questions, though, were open so that I had space to give longer more open answers. We did, in fact, follow some of the advice from the "Conducting Interviews" reading: Grace asked open questions in order to receive freer answers, and I did get to see some of the major question ideas in advance. As the interviewee, I found this helpful because it gave me a chance to reflect a little bit on my experiences before being on camera. 

The set-up and take down had some small glitches but nothing too serious. We decided to interview outside in the courtyard of the League because we wanted to take a chance with natural lighting. You will hear in the background of the video a dull buzzing noise. We though that the microphone wouldn't pick that up. It did. We certainly learned that sound disturbances can be more audible, even with a localized microphone. Since I am the production manager, it worked out that I did much of the physical camera set-up and take-down. During this time, Grace ran back to the media lab to obtain a microphone because we didn't think we would need to specifically request it (we thought the class name was enough). Through a fire drill, wacky cloud movement, and several sound checks (just to be sure!), we still managed to conduct a good amount of interview time. Despite some distracting chirping chipmunks at the end of our second half of the interview, I think it turned out fine!

Grace: Ari did a great job of summarizing our experience creating our mini oral. It was great that she had such a large archive on hand that we could choose from. I think she definitely illustrates the concept of the fluidity and instability of personal memory described in the "Constructing Memory" reading. She knew that she wanted to remember some pivotal moments in her life so she wrote down her experiences and keeps them with her. Archives Power says writing was constructed as a means of stabilizing information over time. It is great that Ari has already embraced writing for this purpose, keeping a personal archive with her as a means of stabilizing information about her own life that she deems important. 

One last comment about the procedure in this mini oral, getting everything onto iMovie takes a REALLY long time...

Here's a clip from our interview where Ari talks about a Diversity Conference she attended:

Here is a portion of Ari's Archive, a written conversation at the SDLC conference: