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