Group Critique 4 – Oral History

This critique required us to assess five main points:

  1. How interview choices were influenced by Ready Player One.
  2. How interview choices were influenced by the StoryCorps project.
  3. Why they chose the interview subject and topic and how they conducted the interview.
  4. How technical tools (recording, editing) influenced final product.
  5. If public domain or creative commons sounds were used to supplement the interview, explain what they are and provide a link to each file.

Link to Olivia’s draft: https://soundcloud.com/user-214171295/rought-draft-audio-story

I chose to analyze Olivia’s project. I can tell her project was influenced partly by Ready Player One in a few ways. Olivia asks her mom about the biggest pieces of technology she grew up with, and a big part of Ready Player One was the discussion of old tech throughout the book. Throughout the story, Parzival never misses a chance to talk about the technology he encountered from the past decades. Another source of influence from Ready Player One that I can hear Olivia referring to is when she asks her mother about video games, and she replies by talking about the arcade and games like Pac-Man. The novel itself was based on a giant, virtual video game known as the OASIS, so that fit well.

Olivia drew her interview choices also from the StoryCorps project in which she asked her mom a series of questions about her mom’s experience growing up. The StoryCorps project is all about finding more about the interviewee’s life and that’s just what Olivia did by asking her questions about her childhood.

She conducted her interview by asking her subject a series of questions about the technology in her life as she grew up. She started by asking some broad questions and then asked some more specific ones as she spent more time with the subject.

I can see she posted her project to SoundCloud online. I am not quite certain how she recorded it however.

So far I have not heard any outsourced sounds, but maybe there will be some in her final draft of the project.

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