Update on Project Activities
We have one new interview that has been captured on audio. The interviewee is a Stanford student who grew up in the Stanford/Palo Alto area and has noticed the changing water levels of Lake Lagunita within the past decades. In our interview, he shares the story of seeing Lake Lagunita change. We have a few leads that we are pursuing for future interviews. We have been in contact with Danny to find time to meet with Sarah and Zack, the Tech Interactive summer interns. What We Observed and Learned (& Some Critical Analysis) Even though we conducted an interview and the interviewee shared his experience of witnessing the ebbs and flows of Lake Lagunita and attributed this trend to climate change, we also want to reflect on the process of validating claims made in interviews and not focus on capturing such claims exclusively. After we shared the raw interview clips with our community partner, Danny, he suggested that we speak to Stanford staff who might be able to confirm that the reservoir is dry due to climate-change related reasons to confirm the connection. After all, we may not have extensive scientific knowledge on the tangible, local effects of climate change regarding what is and what is not attributed to climate change. For future interviews, we may try to do background research on the stories interviewees intend on telling in order to ensure the validity of the information. Conducting the interview was great practice in using the heavy duty recording equipment Danny supplied. This interview will help us to gauge how long an interview actually takes including time to set up and test equipment. Regarding audio editing, I was able to play around with iMovie to edit the raw audio and get familiar with the software. With this, editing Danny’s short stories from the climate march will be a more streamlined experience. I learned how to overlap clips, shorten clips, and quiet white noise in the background of audio. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward First, we are planning to listen through the edited audio files that Danny shared with us to bolster our understanding of an ideal sound clip. Moving forward, we will focus more intently on generating leads to interview. Second, we are planning to aggressively pursue leads and conduct interviews. In order to find leads we have primarily been trying to contact people we know and ask if they have any connections to people who might have an interesting story to share. The past interns, Zack and Sarah, also left us a list of potential contacts and/or fields that they were unable to pursue during their time working on this project. Therefore, we are hopeful that we will be able to find leads through that source. So far we have already made some connections with some of our peers who are from the Bay Area. We are excited about getting stories from college students as it gives us a youth perspective without having to deal with the complexities of trying to interview minors. We also are looking into collaborating with an organization on campus, Habla, that offers English language lessons to campus service workers. We might try to attend one of their meetings and conduct some short interviews with any service workers who would be interested. After contacting some professors/faculty members, I was given the contact for Community Engaged Learning on the Environment who might either be able to be interviewed or point us in the direction of some other really fruitful contacts. Our next steps in this realm are to continue contacting leads and starting to set up times/dates/places during which we can conduct the actual interviews. The preparation aspect of this interview process has proven to be a little more difficult and slower than anticipated. It took us a while to narrow in on what types of community members we hoped to get in contact with and therefore have only recently started reaching out to leads. However, we still have a decent amount of time and are confident that as long as we continue to be persistent in the search for interviews that we will be able to get the 8 quality interviews we need to complete this project. Third, we are planning to edit short stories Danny recorded at a climate march. All but two of Zack and Sarah’s interviews have been edited, and all of Danny’s have not been edited. Two clips in particular that he noted might be promising are called “Raging Grannies.” One of the clips is chanting, and the other is an interview. Synthesizing these two clips together for the final would be engaging and is something we will do. Finally, we are planning to get in contact with Zack and Sarah and consult with them about pursuing leads in areas other than Stanford/Palo Alto. Though capturing stories nearby Stanford is important, providing the visitors of the Tech with a representative portrayal of the climate crisis in the Bay Area is critical Comments are closed.
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