Along this text we are going to evaluate our
project of Oral History. We will talk about the topic and narrator chosen, the
preparation and the interview itself, the way we worked as a group and some
other points as difficulties, personal opinions of the research, what we have
learnt…
First of all, as we said, we want to explain
some things about the topic and the narrators we chose for this project. It did
not take too much time for us to select the subject for this research project;
we easily decided to do it about the Olympic Games in Barcelona. Since it was a
very important national event and it was not too many years ago, we could have asked
to a few people, but we were determined to interview two people, someone who
had lived in Barcelona in those days and another person who lived in another
place so we could easily see the differences among the perceptions of this
event in distinct places. And this is how we chose Federico and Jesús. They
helped us from the very first moment and their experiences were very favorable
for our project. Nevertheless, afterwards, we can see that it could have been
very interesting and enriching for us to have interviewed a volunteer from the
Olympics in Barcelona or even an athlete, but it was very hard for us to find
someone who met this profile.
The preparation of the interview also seemed
like a piece of cake. As soon as we chose the topic “Olympic Games in
Barcelona” we decided the scope of the project and the specific points we
wanted to investigate and learn from. Then, by the time we had to prepare the
questions we just had to ask our interviewees about these topics, which were
about the internationalization of the city and the event, the kind of
information broadcasted in the media, the security measures, people’s attitude
towards sport and the Olympics and, of course, letting a time for them to tell
us any interesting data or remembrance. Besides, before doing the interview we
looked for information about the Olympics in a few websites, like the International
Olympic Committee,
the Spanish Olympic Committee (COE) and the RTVE home pages; this way, we were
aware of the political, historical and economical situations in those days in
Spain.
Once we knew what we wanted to ask in the
interviews we proceeded to do them. Actually, we didn’t prepare specific questions that we wrote
down, but our interviews were more natural and like a normal conversation. This
way, we wanted our narrators to feel more comfortable. And it worked; they told us everything we
were expecting and more. During the interviews there was one of us, Nieves or
Irene, and the narrator and they lasted around 15 minutes. It was nice that both
of them allowed us to record the conversations, so we could use them afterwards
to make this project. We think that one of the most helpful points when doing
the interviews is that we personally knew the interviewees, therefore we all
felt calmer and with a biggest inclination to collaborate.
All the members of the group, Nieves and Irene,
have worked in a similar way. This means that we have both done more or less
the same kind of things. From the beginning we established the topic, the
objectives, etc., and from then on everything seemed to be very easy to follow.
Each of us selected a narrator and did the interview. After that we analysed the
interviews together and wrote down the comments on each of them. During the
process of the project, we divided some of the job to be done so both of us
could do something, such as the search of information of curiosities or the
history of the Olympic Games. Despite this “specialization” in a few topics, we
worked in a very similar way, together and with a very good group environment.
While we were doing this project we had to face
some problems. Thankfully they were not too much nor too difficult to solve. The
biggest trouble we had was the use of the blog, especially the configuration
and so on, because none of us had ever use Blogger or any other similar program
before. But we were lucky that another partner from class could help us in
order to solve our problems. Apart from this, we did not have many more difficulties,
or we knew how to deal with them easily, as it happened with one of our
narrators, who lived in Barcelona, and it could have been hard to do the
interview, but we did it by a phone call and had no more complications.
Along this Oral History project, we have learnt
many interesting things from the topic we chose, Olympic Games, like the fact
that the burning arrow thrown by an archer in the inauguration of the event did
not entered in the cauldron as we all thought! But we have also learnt a few
things about the Oral History research method. It is not as easy as other
methods, since you cannot extrapolate the data you gathered because it is a personal
point of view from a specific person; but it is very interesting to see how
people have lived the same event in different ways.
