Data collection has begun!
I'm so excited to report that I've collected my first data. Last week, I interviewed Saisha Grayson, the curator of Musical Thinking: New Video Art and Sonic Strategies. She travels back and forth between DC and NYC quite regularly, so I caught about an hour with her before her train. We met in the lovely Kogod Courtyard at SAAM/NPG, which I always think of as "outside" - I have to remind myself there is technically a roof over it.
I didn't have an interpreter scheduled for this meeting, so I used Google Live Transcribe during the conversation. I had confirmed with her before hand that it would be okay to keep the transcript long enough to make notes from it; I can easily take notes while watching an interpreter, but not while watching a transcription. It turned out, though, that I didn't need that copy at all. She's currently working with a Fulbright scholar from Taiwan, Hua-Tzu Chan, whose focus is on accessibility in museums and who had tagged along for the meeting. I didn't realize it at the time, but Hua-Tzu used OtterAI transcription while Saisha and I were talking, and she sent me an excellent transcript that I've now taken notes from. I tried to do it the same way I might have taken notes during the interview itself, using my usual note-taking techniques - but I have to figure out what to do with the notes, now. 📝
I had a meeting with my supervisors yesterday, and caught them up on what I'm doing. I gave a brief summary of my interview with Saisha, and Richard said that it sounds like my questions are well-designed, because I've collected interesting information. That was good news to hear. I need to start building my training plan, though, because "what do I do with the notes" is actually the much larger question "how do I analyze the data?" There are webinars and books and all sorts of materials to answer that question, so I need to start laying groundwork for how I will be analyzing it so that my note-taking during interviews and focus groups is more useful.
In 16 days I will head off to Ottawa. I'm nervous and excited - interviewing one person in my own town is easy, but in Canada, it gets real! Of course, it was supposed to "get real" a couple of months ago, but I had COVID. So now it gets real in just over two weeks.
