{"id":48,"date":"2012-02-21T15:39:43","date_gmt":"2012-02-21T15:39:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/?p=48"},"modified":"2012-02-28T15:56:10","modified_gmt":"2012-02-28T15:56:10","slug":"selecting-material","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/2012\/02\/21\/selecting-material\/","title":{"rendered":"Selecting material"},"content":{"rendered":"

At this stage we are deep into selecting material for the OER from both the Mass Observation Archive and the British Library Sound Archive<\/a><\/a>.\u00a0 We\u2019re basing our selections on a set of key themes which underpin the current undergraduate course, and on which the final OER will be broadly based.\u00a0 These include topics such as: Britain at War- the Falklands Conflict and Northern Ireland; work, unemployment and technology; the unions (the miners\u2019 strike); community, nation and race; cultures of resistance and identity as well as Thatcher and Thatcherism.\u00a0 Everyone has their own ideas about what are the pertinent themes, but these are what we\u2019ve gone with.<\/p>\n

Professor Dorothy Sheridan has been doing the bulk of the work on selections from Mass Observation and will be reporting back on her explorations here shortly.\u00a0 Meanwhile, I have been immersing myself in the British Library\u2019s Sound Archive, which has meant a crash course in using their catalogue, and some long days sporting headphones.\u00a0 The Listening and Viewing Service staff have been really helpful once they realised that I wasn\u2019t being overly ambitious in ordering up to 70+ hours of listening material at each appointment.\u00a0 Instead, thanks to the interview summaries in the catalogue I have been able to hone in on specific sections rather than listen to whole interviews, and have thus been able to cover a fairly large amount of material.\u00a0 The reason for this very targeted approach is that we realised that in the final OER we will probably be using fairly short excerpts, maybe between 3-10 minutes.\u00a0 After some discussion we also agreed that, as the Mass Observation materials tend to be very strong in providing reflective content, what we want from the oral histories is complementary narratives.\u00a0 So searches have been focused on finding interviews from people \u2018who were there\u2019 and can offer direct experience of some of the key events which relate to our themes.<\/p>\n

No doubt other researchers would do this differently.\u00a0 We\u2019ve taken a largely pragmatic approach.\u00a0 It does mean some lovely, fascinating material has to fall by the wayside.\u00a0 I was gripped by the account of a woman peace activist involved in driving supplies to Croatia in the 1990s to feed the elderly and infirm who were abandoned during ethnic cleansing. \u00a0\u00a0It was fascinating and moving stuff, but it doesn\u2019t really fit into our selection criteria, so I\u2019m not sure she\u2019ll make the cut as the 1980s material that lead me to her isn\u2019t nearly so powerful.\u00a0 Some choices are totally subjective \u2013 someone who recounts an interesting story in a mind-numbingly monotone voice probably isn\u2019t going to make the cut either.\u00a0 The material in our OER has to appeal to and engage its target audience, which in the first instance, is undergraduates.\u00a0 That means it has to be pertinent, listenable and readable.\u00a0 We\u2019ve had similar debates over the handwriting in some Mass Observation materials.\u00a0 The content may be wonderful, but if it\u2019s almost impossible to actually make out, how well is it going to serve our purpose?\u00a0 It\u2019s a harsh reality that we\u2019re having to make these decisions all the way through, and that some wonderful material just won\u2019t feature.\u00a0 It\u2019s true too that there is the potential for hundreds more OERs in just these two great archival sources, if only there were the budget!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At this stage we are deep into selecting material for the OER from both the Mass Observation Archive and the British Library Sound Archive<\/a><\/a>.\u00a0 We\u2019re basing our selections on a set of key themes which underpin the current undergraduate course, and on which the final OER will be broadly based.\u00a0 These include \u2026 Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[168],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions\/65"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/observingthe80s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}