Ottawa: Part 1
I am so very excited to tell you that things are going great in Ottawa so far. I only got four hours of sleep the first night, but I still managed to have a great day on Friday, and I got eight hours last night, making for a great Saturday.
I took this photo in the office of the Director General at the Canada Science and Technology Museum. We had a wonderful conversation that really made me feel like my work over the past three years has been effective. I really feel validated in my work so far. Everything we talked about aligned beautifully with the research I've done so far: our discussions about building materials, bilingual captions and subtitles, and audio technology covered every hypothesis I've been making in my work. The CSTM has been through some unique challenges, which happen to make it a perfect case study for my research.
I also interviewed the curator of their Sound by Design exhibition, whose 2019 article about museum sound design prompted me to include CSTM in my work. He was just as delighted to talk to me as I was to talk to him, as he has never talked with a deaf person who visited that exhibit, and he was thrilled to find out some of his guesses about accessibility were right. Both he and the Director General are looking forward to the results of my focus group, as they have wanted to plan their own, but haven't done it yet.
The CSTM's director of Truth, Reconciliation, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility (TREDIA) also met with me for a bit, and while our conversations were not focused on my research, we did cover some interesting topics.
Today I got to play tourist for a while. It was terribly cold - the temperatures were 35-40 degrees but I think the wind chill brought it below freezing much of the day. I enjoyed walking around Byward Market anyway, and I got my second vegetarian poutine of the trip at Zak's Diner. Today was Remembrance Day, so there were a ton of poppy pins everywhere, and some shop hours were adjusted. There were road closures due to the parade, too.
I would've liked to walk over the bridge into Quebec, but it was just too cold. Instead I spent a few minutes warming up at the Ottawa Art Gallery, where I enjoyed learning about the Canadian Floor Masters, part of the history of hip-hop in the Ottawa-Gatineau area.
Tomorrow I'm going back to CSTM for the accompanied visit and focus group. I can't wait to see how it goes!