Onward to analysis
I just finished a Zoom call with my supervisors, and I feel like I know what's next.
First, my biggest lesson from Colorado Springs: don't listen to hearing people. 🤣
You may remember that I went to the US Olympic and Paralympic Museum because so many people at the museum conference in Denver told me how inclusive it was. It's been lauded for its accessibility, even receiving the Grand Award in 2020 from the International Association for Universal Design. And sure enough, there were a lot of great features for accessibility, including low-dexterity handles for SoundStiks and visual description for just about everything.
There were interpreters on every video, too! It was pretty deaf-accessible. Maybe even deaf-friendly. But...it wasn't the utopia I'd been led to believe. Not every video had the interpreters next to the content, and you can't ping-pong back and forth between content and ASL; not everything was correctly captioned; some employees were well-trained in communication with deaf visitors, and some looked like they were terrified of me; the theater was supposed to have a T-coil neckloop option but I was told I'd have to go to the front desk to get it...and, of course, there was no mention of deaf people anywhere, even though deaf Americans have competed at both the Olympics and Paralympics.
I realized while there that everyone who had told me about USOPM's inclusivity had been hearing. This is a perfect illustration of why you need to bring in deaf people during the museum development process: because hearing people don't experience the world through deaf eyes, no matter how much they work with deaf people.
(Note: Kudos to the Rocky Mountain Motorcycle Museum, which did have a photo of deaf bikers! Was not expecting that from a drop-in side visit!)
So, what's next?
I have all this data and I needed to figure out what to do with it. In my meeting with my supervisors this morning, I planned out a narrative of some of my early findings - things I noticed during the fieldwork process. I'm not committing to anything at this point, it's just part of the early data analysis: writing down all the things I've been thinking about. It seems like this is obvious, but when faced with mountains of notes and hours of video, it's hard to know where to begin. I have some ideas now and I'm excited to get things down on paper!
This newsletter was created primarily for the fieldwork process, but I'll continue to share thoughts periodically as I progress. For now, enjoy the gorgeous view from the USOPM events hall, with Pikes Peak to the right.
(That will probably be the last cool travel photo now that fieldwork is done...I will find other illustration options!)