Acquisition has been acquired!

Today I'm posting pictures from the final acquisition day of the Legacies Project collaboration between the Museum of African American History and Y Arts Detroit.

As you've probably guessed, by "acquisition" we mean acquiring senior citizens’ oral histories on videotape. Generally teams of three students are assigned to a single senior.

One student is the camera operator.

Another is the audio engineer.

And the third one
conducts the interview.

We have a minimum of three acquisition sessions so students can experience all three jobs.
Y Arts Detroit had 18 age-appropriate (older than 15) students signed up for the July session of their Summer Media Arts Camp, so we were able to interview six area seniors, whom you see on this page with their teams, which were named by the students (as you'll see...):

Mary Martin, age 95, with half of the team "Ninja Pandas";

Suane Loomis, with the other half of the Ninja Pandas;

Shirley Northcross with half of A1 Productions;

David Northcross with the other half of A1 Productions;

George Ramsey with Team America;

Louise Adams with Team America (not doing jazz hands);

Louise Adams with Team America (doing jazz hands ...sorry).

This Legacies Project installation is far from over. Next the teams of students will add data tags to the video to make sure the Legacies Project archive will be fully keyword-searchable. As far as we know, we’re the first non-profit project that’s training students to add metadata tags to an oral history database. (Huge kudos and thanks to the technical and vocabulary wizards at the Ann Arbor District Library for working with us to create the new online data tagging tool!)

Then comes a huge part of any Legacies installation: The students—either working within their acquisition teams or sharing video across groups—collaborate on editing short stories from the video they shot. Project administrators and Y Arts Detroit camp counselors will help them craft good narratives with beginnings, middles and ends. Once the students have an approved cut, they’ll submit image requests to the seniors, asking for photos or artifacts (ticket stubs, posters, etc.) that will add visual interest and help tell the elders’ stories. We’ll schedule a scanning party at Museum of African American History in the next week or so to gather that media, which will also go into the online archive.

Anyone who has ever edited video knows the students have a whole lot of work ahead of them! But it’s a great group; they’ll knock it out of the park.

More photos soon!

Jimmy

What an Awesome Day!

Today we began a Legacies Project installation in Detroit, MI!

First things first -- to acknowledge the organizations who are making it happen: The installation is being made possible by a grant from the Community Foundation of Southeast Michigan, and we are teamed with the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, who have recruited senior participants with amazing stories to tell, and are hosting the interviews and, later, the public screening. We found our young participants by partnering with the folks at Y Arts Detroit at the Downtown YMCA, who are running two consecutive Media Arts Camps, one in July and one in August. The Legacies Project will be part of the programming in both camps.

Today, the students got a lesson in the basics of video (shot composition, lighting, etc.), received IRB training about the ethics of research, learned how to conduct effective interviews, and went through gerontology empathy training.

But before the campers received any training, we kicked the day off with peer-to-peer interviews.

So, what's a peer-to-peer interview (besides the obvious)? It's our way of doing pre- and post-project evaluations of young participants' attitudes about aging and elders.

Many social commentators have observed that America is probably the most ageist society on the planet, and of course the students who come to Legacies are products of the larger culture. Whether they even know it or not, they may have picked up on some really horrible cues, especially from the mass media. Think about how elders are portrayed on the typical sitcom, and the ways in which they're the butt of jokes. It's a far, far cry from societies where intergenerational households are the norm, and where the wisdom of community elders is held in high esteem.

We have the students talk to each other about these feelings without the project administrators around. We get more candid answers that way. (I only poked my head in briefly to take the pics you see here.)

We haven't had a chance to review what the campers had to say yet, but we hope that when we compare their attitudes toward aging and elders today to their attitudes at the end of the project, we'll see meaningful growth. So far, we always have. We're looking forward to the process here in the D.

Tomorrow we put our participating seniors through an orientation, and on Monday our campers and our elders meet for the first time.

We'll keep you posted!

-Jimmy