Revised Questions: Oral Histories Regarding Braille

I am sincerely grateful for all of the feedback I received (in various channels) about my last post. Below I list the questions I ended up asking during the first three interviews I conducted. Keep in mind that the interviews were much more like conversations than this somewhat sterile list of questions might imply.

  1. Please tell us a little about yourself.
  2. What is your experience today with using braille in everyday life?
  3. What do you remember about when you first started learning braille?
  4. What was the hardest thing about learning braille?
  5. Looking back now, what’s your opinion of the way you were taught braille?
  6. Today, when you read for pleasure, what kind of material do you read and how do you read it? (audio? braille?)
  7. Some say that listening to a book is not an example of literacy and that only by reading through braille is a person literate. What’s your opinion?
  8. With new technologies making it so easy to listen to books and other kinds of writing, is there a good reason to preserve braille and keep teaching people how to use it?
  9. Do braille readers have any advantages over sighted readers?
  10. Let’s turn now from reading to writing. How do you compose your writing? What tools do you use? How do you edit? Do you use a brailler?
  11. When you were a child, did you have any adult role models who were visually impaired or blind?
  12. Do you think it’s important for young people who are visually impaired or blind to have adult role models who are, too?
  13. As far as you know, are you a role model to any young people?

[Photo by Flickr user antonioxalonso. Licensed under Creative Commons.]

Collecting Oral Histories Regarding Braille

As part of a project involving USC Upstate’s Special Education – Visual Impairment program and the University of South Carolina Center for Digital Humanities, I’ll be helping to gather oral histories from individuals all over the state covering their experiences with braille: teachers, students, adults, children, parents, friends…

One of the undergraduate student assistants on the project, Rashad Morgan, generated the following questions, which I think are good ones. However, we’d appreciate feedback from anyone who has some experience with oral histories. For one thing, I suspect that we currently have too many questions.

Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Ice Breakers

  1. In one minute or less, tell me about you?
  2. What are some of your hobbies or things you enjoy doing?
  3. Who is your favorite person in the world to be with?
  4. How long have you known them?
  5. Are you nervous or worried about being interviewed? (If they are, then try to comfort them.)

Questions for Older Individuals

  1. What are your feelings about braille and how do you use braille in your daily life?
  2. What is one of your favorite memories about learning braille?
  3. How long did it take for you to learn to read braille?
  4. What advice would you give to other people who are learning braille?
  5. What was the most difficult thing about learning braille and why?
  6. Looking back, what, if anything, could have been done to make your experience learning braille easier or go more smoothly?
  7. How do you feel about reading braille either in conjunction or instead of print?
  8. Does it ever make you feel awkward or different from everybody else?
  9. Does reading and writing in braille make life more challenging? If so, what are some of the challenges?

Questions for Younger Individuals

  1. What are your feelings about braille and how do you use braille in your daily life?
  2. What are some of the fun things about learning and using braille?
  3. Do you have braille books that you enjoy reading?
  4. If so, what are your favorites?
  5. What is one of your favorite memories about learning braille?
  6. What was the most difficult thing about learning braille and why?
  7. What advice would you give to other people who are learning braille?
  8. How do you feel in the classroom when you read braille and others use print?
  9. Do other students and/or others treat you differently because you are different from them or because you read braille?
  10. Do you have friends that read braille too?
  11. What are your favorite things to do together?
  12. Do you have older friends or family members who read braille?
  13. Do you feel comfortable asking them for help? Why or why not?

Maruca on C18, Cyborgs, Literacy…No, really!

methodism, orality, and literacy

Any academics out there want to read the draft of an article I’m working on? I really need some outside perspective. If you don’t have time or inclination to read the whole thing, do you have any suggestions for recent scholarly work on the interplay of orality and literacy? Here’s the introduction:

Over the course of the eighteenth century, the British religious movement known as Methodism created a sophisticated communications network. This network incorporated not only print, through the publication and distribution of millions of pages of material in a variety of formats, but also speech, specifically the highly systematized oral practice of hundreds of itinerant preachers at hundreds of Methodist preaching houses. Little scholarship on Methodists and print culture has appeared in recent years, which is surprising, given their prolific publishing and the recent growth of print culture studies. Similarly, although some have addressed Wesley’s reliance upon traveling lay preachers, we have yet to see a satisfactorily detailed picture of the preachers’ role in taking the movement’s message to hundreds of thousands of listeners. The histories of sound and of auditory culture are attracting a growing number of scholars who would do well to turn their attention to preaching.

However, any scholarship on eighteenth-century print culture or speech arguably provides a flawed, partial view of the communicative practices of the period by ignoring the dynamic interactions of literate and oral practices to focus on either independently. In fact, such independent focus risks adopting uncritically a limited conception of language first fully developed in the eighteenth century. Nicholas Hudson has traced the “slow and uncertain” emergence during this period of the concept of “oral tradition,” a belief that a “substantial body of knowledge or literature could be preserved without the use of letters.” Although, as Hudson explains, this concept gradually lost its controversial status, it leaves us with our modern understanding of orality and literacy as separate spheres of habit and thought. Counter to this understanding, D. F. McKenzie has argued persuasively that different modes of communication interact in complex ways: “None surrenders its place entirely; all undergo some adjustment as new forms arrive and new complicities of interest and function emerge.”

Following McKenzie’s lead, this essay analyzes early Methodism’s simultaneous embrace of the pulpit and the press, an embrace that placed the movement at the intersection of oral and literate cultures in Britain and that complicates any easy formulation of orality and literacy as separate cultures. For eighteenth-century Methodists, not only was the printed word enmeshed in a world of speech, but the spoken word often relied upon print in order to be most effective. What follows is an analysis of Methodist preaching, of Methodist publishing, and of the ways in which these two practices became inseparable. Finally, a discussion of one early Methodist publishing project, The Arminian Magazine, clearly illustrates the ways in which oral and literate practices complemented and competed with each other.

stencils

On June 5, 2005, I uploaded this photo (from London, England).

On February 2, 2007, I uploaded this photo (from Asheville, North Carolina).

Your thoughts?

This just in: The London piece appears to be the work of the artist known as Banksy. His balloon girl crops up in a handful of Google Image results. So who’s the Asheville imitator?
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