Michael Altomare

Michael Altomare’s Assignment Reflection

I would like to thank Kim Martin, and the people at Norfolk Manor for putting this whole thing together.

Click here for Michael's interviewee, Robert Logan's page, and a link to the audio file of the full interview.

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From the beginning of the semester the entire course prepared me for this assignment. Throughout my university experience I had not quite realized the relevancy, and impact of oral history on the history discipline. Oral history has been relied on many times to give proper accounts of historic events:

“Jules Michelet studied the French Revolution, a half century after it took place, by contrasting official documents with recollections of peasants, townsfolk, old men, women, even children, which you can hear if you enter an evening into a village tavern.”^[1]

My original perception of oral history involved a more lenient atmosphere, similar to telling stories by a campfire. This was also a reason which made me sceptical of the oral history process, as there is no real sense of proof to what the research participant is saying. The history is not peer reviewed or edited which was something I had never experienced before. These reasons made this assignment very compelling to me, as it was something different. I now had the ability to hear, interpret, and ultimately contextualize an individual’s history. The readings, and class discussions conducted throughout the semester all involved different aspects of oral history. These specific aspects were all things we were going to encounter during the process of this assignment. For example, the ethics of conducting an oral history interview.  There are many ethical concerns I did not initially think of when conducting an interview:

“TCPS2 follows three core principles to promote human dignity: respect for persons; concern for welfare; and justice. The policy allows room for differences between academics and communities and acknowledges that researchers must often make difficult choices to balance the protection of research participants and the requirements of research.”^[2]

The oral history process involved much more preparation than I initially anticipated. Having to consider developing questions while keeping the participant comfortable, and also making those insightful enough to retrieve sufficient information is a tough task. 

At the beginning of the semester, our class partnered up and conducted short interviews with one another. This initial interview prepared me in the sense that I was able to grasp what kinds of questions to ask, along with becoming comfortable with the process. It was also important to have a feel for the hierarchy of authority during the interview process. It is apparent that the interviewer controls the interview thus, maintaining power. However, it is vital to note the significance of the interviewee due to the entirety of the project being based off their stories. In Stacey Zembrzycki’s, Sharing Authority with Baba, she affirms:

“Although the decision to share authority with Baba was difficult to make, it was absolutely necessary.”^[3]

Through this article I learned the importance of submitting some authority as the interviewer to have a more successful interview.

The preliminary meeting with Bob was very helpful in preparing helpful in preparing me for the interview process. Initially, I was quite nervous as I did not know what to expect, or who to expect. I was not sure what to expect when interviewing a senior. One thing I did remember from the reading, Interviewing Older People by G. Clare Wenger, was that only seven to ten percent of elderly people experience forms of cognitive impairment.^[4] Once Bob and I began conversing I started to get more comfortable and began to note the information he was telling me. As Donald Ritchie states:

“Familiarize yourself with whatever information is available about the general subject matter and about the people to be interviewed, their families, communities, jobs, successes, and failures.”^[5]

After formulating the notes, I took after my preliminary meeting with Bob I noticed the emphasis he put on his career as a librarian. I knew that I would have to surround my topic to something of that matter. It was quite convenient that Bob worked at the University of Guelph. This made much of the preliminary information quite accessible for me. After scanning through names that he mentioned, and tasks he did I was able to develop a topic based off his long career at the University. Bob began his tenure in 1968, four years following the inauguration of the University of Guelph and retired in 1991. Essentially, Bob witnessed the growth of the University of Guelph firsthand. Both Bob’s career, and university became older, and more significant throughout the years. I felt that this was a perfect topic to contextualize Bob’s history. My biggest concern was finding articles, or anything on record that mentioned him specifically. Bob mentioned that he was involved in many projects however, I was concerned that there would be no written data documenting it. I was pleasantly surprised to see several articles in the Atrium which mention him. The Atrium is the University of Guelph’s institutional repository, where they store important materials. I was able to affirm many of the stories Bob told me through this finding, along with many others he failed to mention. The accessibility of these sources online allowed me to make developments in my research. I went into the interview prepared with my interview guides, and several items which he was mentioned, or illustrated in. The advantage of voice recording an interview was very apparent in my experience due to the sheer length of the interview. To quote Donald Ritchie:

“... recording radically expands and improves any interview. The longer last, the more interviewers tire and miss nuances. Later, when listening to the recording inevitably hear more than they did during the interview itself. Note takers may make honest mistakes in what they hear or find their handwriting hard to decipher."^[6]

My interview was 1:07:30 long, which would have been a nightmare to note the entire time. The use of a recording device was very handy during my interview process.

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When it came to working with CWRC, I would say that it was an interesting experience to say the least. I would not call myself very technologically sound, especially when it comes to new things. The large advantage of a system like CWRC for me is that it permits me to keep tabs on my classmates. CWRC allowed me to encounter my classmates work which helped me realize what I was doing right, or wrong throughout this assignment. I think if were to re-do the interview process, I would ask Bob more questions regarding his family. He had so much insight on his career, so that is why I made it my topic. However, it would have been interesting to know more about his family upbringing, and family situation. I felt like we focused on his career almost too much, and by the time we were done talking about his career, the interview was already an hour long.

All in all, this was a very fun and educational process for me as a graduating student. I had studied history for so many years however, I never got the chance to conduct it myself.  

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Endnotes