What a terrible blogger I am. My deepest apologies to my devoted followers and my fieldwork and thesis advisers. And myself, because this project is for me, right? Right.
So! Since interviewing Joey Ashenbrenner and Arnold Aprill, I've interviewed:
- Craig Harshaw, Executive Director of Insight Arts Foundation
- Mark Diaz, Program Associate, and Joseph Spilberg, Research Associate, at CAPE
- Marvinetta Penn, Executive Director of Global Girls
- Courtney Reid, Sr. Director of Organizational Effectiveness and Grants Administration, and Iu-Luen Jeng, Youth Program Clinician (and SAIC alum!), at Center on Halsted
- A teen participant at Insight Arts
Whew. I'm hoping to speak with a couple more adults and several more youth participants (or former participants) before I wrap on shooting, but there's a whole lot of footage and I need to finish capturing it and start laying it out very very soon-
OH! Right. I don't think I mentioned that the youth-centric portion of my fieldwork, the Living Newspaper project, was called off entirely. Entirely. Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), my whole project has had to shift and I'll need to fully recognize in my thesis writing that I failed to immerse myself in the participant perspective and instead I must work almost exclusively from the end of adult organizers and administrators, despite my initial desire to avoid exactly that. I so wanted a well-rounded thesis that made a strident effort to acknowledge and explore perspectives and biases. I wanted to be able to say I really gathered my information from not only the group of people who found and operate youth arts programs, but also the youth who participate in and contribute to those programs. I wanted a different thesis... but this is the one I have. I will still make the best of it. I am making the best of it. It's just going to be a very different project than the one I envisioned even just a few months ago.
That being said, I had to come up with a new way to structure my video data. I intended to create a documentary detailing the experience working with the teens at Insight Arts and pairing pertinent aspects with interview footage from allllll these discussions with adults working in the nonprofit youth arts field. Without the teen footage, all I have in interviews and I simply cannot produce a DVD of talking head interviews. Absolutely not. I realized that as I laid awake in bed the night I found out about the Living Newspaper project cancellation. I was fretting something awful, and continued to fret for days and days. I fretted and I fretted. I forgot, then remembered, then fretted some more. Then one morning I woke up not fretting but nurturing this tiny seedling of an idea that had sprouted in my brain during the night. As it turns out, some ideas blossom with great rapidity and a solution struck me as I flipped open the shampoo bottle in the shower. *Click!*
It was my immediate opinion that the internet has offered few technological novelties greater than the tag. I have used tags to label and sort blog entries for almost a decade, and more recently to submit my #tweets to #relevantcommunities. Tags will play an important role in a video/internet community art project I"m developing (for after grad school), and now- NOW- now they will play an important role in sorting my interactive thesis DVD. Wanna see what my subjects have to say about #socialjustice? Click the link and find out. #community? There's a link for that, too. All of my major key words will have DVD sections dedicated to only their related interview clips. Furthermore, where an interview discusses, for example, social justice and community in relation to each other, both the social justice and community sections of the DVD will link to that video clip *and* each other. I'm going to have to get a lot more graphically saavy to make it look as nice as I think it can, but the DVD building will be relatively simple.
So, yeah. Here's to beating the fear of the unknown (and replacing it with the fear of the all-too-well known).
