Blog 3: Flexibility is Key

Interviews are hard.  This week's blog was supposed to be dedicated to the interview I was to have about the Bromo Tower, my place for our small assignment, however earlier today I got an email saying my interviewee was unable to meet, messing with the timeline of things.  However, I won't dwell and instead thank Professor King for flexible deadlines (thanks again!!).  Interviews are stressful and nerve wracking, however I'm grateful for the opportunity to be involved in a class that values such qualitative methods of research.

My experience with interviewing in the past has been more behind the scenes.  It's been transcribing and coding, involving myself in smaller projects and interviews with people semi-close to me.  This semester will be different as I engage firsthand in the interviewing.  In the future, I'll make sure to plan my interviews before deadlines a little more, but luckily I can take the advice from peers in class tomorrow and use it towards my interview.  I definitely plan to rework my questions more to make sure that they are open-ended, and really pay attention to how people speak and tell their stories.  I love the idea of capturing how people talk and am really interested in working towards doing that.

Throughout class last week we focused a lot on the separation of Baltimore throughout history.  Baltimore as a city seems to me to be consistently divided, almost always through methods of gentrification.  I think that a major question of our project should relate to these divisions within Baltimore that exist.  I think it would be important and beneficial to ask every person we interview: what is your Baltimore.  By asking that question, we can look for themes based on what individuals talk about, it could be the people or the places, I just think a lot of the project needs to build off of what we receive from those that we talk to...this kind of relates back to the idea of being flexible in building the project.

I think my focus would be best in finding these over-arching themes.  I enjoy thinking critically and trying to put together and find the connections (or disconnections) of stories.  I also think it could be really fun to have people participate in cognitive mapping, and through that put together something for the project.