For WA4, I plan on using John Allen’s oral history. I chose him over Mary McCrary because Allen was actually a student at ETSTC, whereas Mrs. McCrary was the wife of an ETSTC professor. The only thing is, is that Allen graduated in 1940. This creates a problem because he wasn’t on or anywhere near campus when the U.S. entered WWII. In fact he was a news editor for a radio station in Houston when war broke out. He provides great information about the effects of wartime on coastal cities, but that doesn’t really help my overall project. So, after expressing my concern and confusion to Dr. Carter, we came up with an altered prompt for WA4. In Allen’s oral history, he mentions how there was a student produced play about Hitler and his advances. This is evidence of awareness of WWII before the U.S.’s entrance into the war. So, WA4 is going to focus on the transition from the Great Depression to WWII shown through The East Texan‘s reflection of the campus. This is going to be done through random sampling of newspapers from 1930-1945. I will find the general percentage of genres of articles (campus news, society news, economic hardships, and war coverage) that were printed. This also utilizes John Allen’s oral history better, since he does talk about the lingering effects of the Depression and student life. WA4 feeds into my overall research project by providing a wider overview of that time period. It delves into a little bit of the time before the U.S.’s entrance into WWII and the time after the war is over. For this paper, I plan on doing a text-based project with pictures from The East Texan to back up important themes.
As far as codes go, after realizing that I need to look at more than just the articles that deal with the war, I should also look at campus and academic life, and society news. My new codes are going to deal with these. Campus life will be denoted as CL. Academic life will be denoted as AL. Finally, society news will be denoted as SN. Since I don’t have fieldnotes over these types of articles, I can’t break these codes down any further. Once I get back into my fieldsite, I’ll keep an eye out and take note of these types of articles.
Extended Fieldnotes over the East Caney Interviews:
Due to technical difficulties, we weren’t able to hear all of the East Caney interview. I know that for me, it was hard to decipher what Mr. Pryor and Mr. Askew were saying. I got the basic information down, like when Mr. Pryor and Mr. Askew were born. We mostly listened to the parts about their experiences with farming and school. The codes that were given were useful. I remember that one of them mentioned that people form East Caney married people from East Caney. If they spoke more about the culture of East Caney, then a code can be made for that.
I didn’t code my fieldnotes while taking notes on the interview. I was more focused on getting down their words and summarizing statements than coding my notes. I find it more beneficial to code my fieldnotes after I take them. This helps with the anaylzing process, and helps me see the prevalent themes of an interview or oral history. I also like to code my notes afterward, because it forces me to thoroughly look through my notes, and helps provoke thoughts of reflection.
