Questions for Interview with John Butt:

Big Business vs. Small Business:
-which is healthier?
-nutrition facts readily available?
-how much do managers/owners know about food?
-possible survey for collaborative research project: would you rather support local or corporate? where do you eat the most? [ex: dominos vs. family owned pizzeria; subway vs. family owned deli]

possible interview questions:
-how long were you in the business?
-did you inherit it?
-how many employees do you have?
-where does the food come from? is it trustworthy?
-where is the food stored?
-what happens to the leftovers?
-how is food prepared?
-who are your typical customers?
-hours? days off? holidays off?
-what time of day do you bring in most revenue?
-are nutrition facts readily available?
-how much do you know about the food?

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Questions for Interview with Brett Swiecinski

Interviewed on April 5, 2011

-Name? Age?
-Where did you work in the food industry?
-For how long?
-What was your job title?
-What were your duties under that job title?

-Do you know where the food comes from? Is it trustworthy?
-Do you know how far it travels to get to your job?
-Corporate food? Organic food? Grown locally or far away? Price differences?
-Where is the food stored?
-How is food prepared? Ordered?
-What happens to the leftovers? How long before something becomes "waste" food?

-Who are your typical customers? (Business ppl, families, teens, college kids, etc)
-Hours? Days off? Holidays off?
-What time of day do you bring in most revenue?
-Are nutrition facts readily available?
-Employees: how many? What kind of people do you typically hire?

-What is your opinion of the quality of the food served? Before it's prepared and after it's cooked?
-Did you eat at your own restaurant? How often?
-How often do you eat at other chain restaurants? Fast food places?
-Do you prefer to eat out or cook at home?

On April 5, I was set to interview Brett Swiecinski at the Wendy's near Rowan University for the Oral History project. I charged two of my cameras the night before - one digital camera with movie-taking capabilities and one camcorder. The reason I had two is because it would have been easier to upload the video from the digital camera, but I wasn't sure if the memory card would hold a 30 minute interview. Therefore I decided to tape with two devices to ensure that I would get what I wanted no matter what.

After I arrived at the Wendy's and met Brett, I discovered that the camcorder only had 5 minutes of battery life. Something had gone wrong during the charging process. I was fairly certain that the 4GB memory card in the digital camera would hold the full interview, so I went ahead with the interview just using that. After about 20 minutes, I stopped the video because I had run out of questions to ask. When I checked the camera, I saw that after 3 minutes of recording, it had shut itself off. Needless to say, I was frustrated and a little embarrassed.

Brett kindly agreed to meet up with me the following day to re-do the interview. I made sure the camcorder charged this time and decided it was better to use that since it is a camcorder after all. One of the girls from my group, Breanne, was able to come along to the interview this time as well. We stopped the tape after the first couple of minutes to make sure the sound quality was good. It was, so we continued. Having Breanne there was extra helpful in two ways. First, it allowed me to check the camera often to make sure things were running smoothly without feeling awkward and interrupting the flow of conversation. Second, she thought of questions I hadn't, so between the two of us, we got a 33 minute interview.

I've learned that test runs on digital equipment is always a good idea, even if you think something is fine. I also learned that it can be very beneficial to have more than one person conduct an interview. Sometimes group work can really pay off.

I've been thinking about food a lot lately. It sounds silly, given the fact that we all HAVE to think about this topic for our projects, but I'm taking it to heart. I've started questioning how I feel after I eat fast food. I never feel good, but I also ignore those feelings because I simply don't have time to do something about it. I am always, always on the run. I don't make time to prepare food for at-the-time consumption nor for future eating. I always find something else that's more important, that requires more of my time. But ignorance is not bliss. I have to face the fact that eating better is something that must become a priority in my life.

I spent a good half hour in the four or so organic aisles of Wegmans last night examining prices and food choices. I used to think that eating organic was some hippie deal...which you'd think I would be into since I am a hippie at heart. But I never gave it a passing thought. Until now, that is. I'm starting to realize that "going organic" may be better for both me and my environment. It also didn't mean I had to be ridiculous about it. Sometimes there are things I want that I can't find in those aisles or that I simply like the way they are. But I am starting to make the switch.

I bought some organic chips and cheese balls and bananas. I wanted to buy the organic strawberries (they actually looked better than the regular ones) but I just couldn't afford the extra money for them. Rome wasn't built in a day, though, and what goes into my stomach won't change overnight. The seed has been planted, however, and I look forward to budgeting so I can afford the organic food. I've even got my mom on board. It feels good to be on the ball about something. I'm happy to be opening my mind and my choices up to someth

There were two things that immediately came to mind when I started reading about oral histories. First I thought of my volunteer job at the Moorestown historical society. I often give tours of the Smith-Cadbury mansion to older folks from the town. I always think it's interesting when they tell me their own personal history and the town's history as I'm showing them around.

The second thing I thought of was a different volunteer job that I just started at Pitman Manor. There were a variety of different things I could do there (I'm working on service credits for an honor society), but the job I ended up with was to help an elderly woman record her history for her daughter. I'll be doing this with her this upcoming Saturday. I think this article will help give me some direction with this project.

Memorable Quotes:
 
"While methods of eliciting and recording them were more or less rigorous in any given case, the absence of audio- and videotape recorders--or digital recording devices--necessitated reliance on human note-takers, thus raising questions about reliability and veracity."

This part made me think of the Bible. I don't want to start a religious rant (and I was raised Catholic) but I have never believed in the Bible, at least not word for word. Some people use exact quotes from the Bible to make certain social and political points. But while the Bible is now written record, and started out as note-taking and pure oral history, which I don't think can be 100% reliable.

"Few people leave self-conscious records of their lives for the benefit of future historians. Some are illiterate; others, too busy. Yet others don't think of it, and some simply don't know how. And many think--erroneously, to be sure--that they have little to say that would be of historical value. By recording the firsthand accounts of an enormous variety of narrators, oral history has, over the past half-century, helped democratize the historical record."

I like that the every day, ordinary person still plays and important part in recording history.

"Oral history interviews are often quite simply good stories. Like literature, their specificity, their deeply personal, often emotionally resonant accounts of individual experience draw listeners--or readers--in, creating interest and sympathy. Edited carefully, they can open the listener to a life very different from his or her own in a non-threatening way. Contextualized thoughtfully, they can help a reader understand personal experience as something deeply social."

I am working on a non-fiction book about someone's life right now. I am interested primarily in creative non-fiction and writing about real people's lives as a career path. This paragraph really added fuel to my interest.

Chapter 4 of Clandinin and Conelly's Narrative Inquiry - "What Do Narrative Inquirers Do?" - was, I thought, a really great example of the usefulness and interest of narrative inquiry. It was a much easier read than "Situation Narrative Inquiry." I felt more connected to the text because of the stories within, and was therefore more interested in what the authors had to say. I think that in a way, this thought proves a point of narrative inquiry: that more meaningful, personal information can have just as big of an effect on research as qualitative information, and for some areas, the best effect.

The authors talked about a "three dimensional narrative inquiry space," which I found to be logical and helpful as a focus of narrative inquiry. It also made me think of something else - this feeling that as I am finishing my bachelor's degree in writing, I find that all of the concepts I've learned seem to pop up over and over again. And what's more, seemingly unrelated topics that I have taken classes in also seem to overlap and come together to form one blanket of useful information that I can apply to many, if not all, aspects of my education. Just as place and time form an intersection within narrative inquiry, so can my background(s) in philosophy, psychology, and advertising intersect with things like multi genre writing, creative work and layout and design.

Quotes:
P. 50
"Dewey's work on experience is our imaginative touchstone for reminding us that in our work, the answer to the ques­ tion, Why narrative? is, Because experience. Dewey provides a frame for thinking of experience "beyond the black box;' that is, beyond the notion of experience being irreducible so that one cannot peer into it. With Dewey, one can say more, experientially, than "because of her experience" when answering why a person does what she does."

P.59
"Jean went backward to her long-ago classroom and forward to her present-day research and to questions ofwhat it means to be a narra­ tive inquirer on the professional knowledge landscape. All of this takes place within a place-her present-day place within a research univer­ sity; where she does research and writes about her work with teachers, and her long-ago place, where she is a country child educated in a small-town school."

P. 60
"What starts to become apparent as we work within our three-dimensional space is that as narrative inquirers we are not alone in this space. This space enfolds us and those with whom we work. Narrative inquiry is a relational in­ quiryas we work in the field, move from field to field text, and from field text to research text."

I'm sure I'm not the first or last to say this: Reading DJ Clandinin's "Situating Narrative Inquiry" really made my head hurt. It wasn't so much the length as the academic language used that made it hard to get through. After I worked at it and revealed what he was trying to say, I liked it and I thought it was very interesting overall. I liked all the different examples given of each turn, and especially the way in which the information really seemed to make sense to a lot of different areas - historical, sociological, psychological, philosophical, etc. I was most interested in what Clandinin had to say about turns 3 and 4. I just wish it had been a bit more straightforward.

A quick reference/personal reminder of the points of this article:

Four Themes in Turn Towards the Narrative Inquiry
(1) a change in the relationship between the person conducting the research and the person participating as the subject (the relationship between the researcher and the researched), (2) a move from the use of number toward the use of words as data, (3) a change from a focus on the general and universal toward the local and specific, and finally (4) a widen- ing in acceptance of alternative epistemologies or ways of knowing. 

Quotes:

P. 7
"We use the term turn strategically because we want to emphasize the movement from one way of thinking to another and highlight the fact that such changes can occur rapidly or slowly, depending on the experience of the researchers and their experiences when doing research."

P. 18/19

"Bruner (1986), in fact, argues that positivistic research begins in wild metaphor. He asserts that it is through the wild metaphors and their interconnections that researchers arrive at a level of abstraction where meaning can be made of the phenomenon of interest. According to Bruner, at that point in time, researchers working
from a base of paradigmatic knowing then define the phenomenon and develop instruments that provide numbers for accounting for the relationships that emerged metaphorically.They continue to use a restricted and confined language, as free of metaphor as possible to account for the facts they observe and the laws they develop. As a result, since metaphor is a tool for opening and deepening understanding, the opportunity for insight and meaning making is flattened. As researchers became less content with labeling numerically the level of kindness or the degree of hope, they may become more interested in understanding the stories of kindness and hopefulness. They begin to wonder about the stories, words, and other linguistic accounts their research masks. In taking this step, they may begin to turn toward narrative inquiry. When researchers become interested in the nuances of meaning, then reducing what was originally word data to numbers is viewed as restricting opportunities for meaning making and understanding."

P. 22
"In the United States, works such as Gunnar Myrdal’s (1944) An American Dilemma or David Potter’s (1954) People of Plenty sought to describe an American character, a set of traits or beliefs that could be used to understand contemporary American society as a whole. In both instances, a single topic—race relations for Myrdal and the middle class for Potter—served as a lens through which to understand the entire nation. In Europe, structuralists such as Claude Levi-Strauss and historians of the Annales School worked at the same level of abstraction. Levi-Strauss’s (1969) key ideas, that societies were hot or cold, raw or cooked, gave other social scientists a frame through which they could see things whole."

1. Did the pictures enhance the experience of my Twitterive, or are there too many?
2. Did I fully explain my reasons for wanting to move to California?
3. Was there a clear connection between my ties to both places (NJ and CA)?
4. Did you fell any sense of urgency from the writing?
5. Was this piece something you could easily understand/connect with?
6. I thought about adding in a few more song lyrics, from songs that really made me connect with the west coast. Would this addition be too much?

Who: me, Pat (brother), Amy (friend), mom

Place: California (happy, sunshine, warm weather); moving on and growing up

Connect/Disconnect: Never thought I'd leave NJ, but I'm starting to feel less connected to things here. But that's a good thing, because it will allow me to try new things and have new goals.

When: 2009 (road trip), now, the near future

Where: California and New Jersey

Why: finally ready to move on, hate the snow (was always complaining about it in tweets)

How: narrative/prose, pictures, song quotes, poems

February 16, 2011

Dear Diary,

    Most partners of boxers or wrestlers or other kinds of dangerous sports hate when their lovers are going into a new battle. They’re afraid that their darling will get seriously injured and maybe even die.
            What pansies! MY baby will never be defeated. Any of those times that she lost a match was simply because she was feeling under the weather that day.  And you can’t cancel a match on account of the sniffles. My woman is tough.
            She is arm wrestling Lil’ Firecracker tomorrow. I’m not worried at all. Alicia will have that little girl’s arm pinned to the table before she even knows what happened.  I’ll be right by her side to cheer her on, sporting a brand new teeshirt with her gorgeous face plastered all over it. And then we’ll go home together and enjoy a peaceful dinner before cuddling and watching movies. My sweetie may be a tough guy in the ring, but she’s all the woman I need at home.

I didn't take issue with writing in any particular genre. The only thing I really hate to write is research papers, but I've sucked it up the times that they needed to be done. Other than that, I like playing around with different formats of texts and different tones when writing.

I wasn't too fond of using Twitter at first (and I'm still not its biggest fan) but I've found that it's kind of a helpful way of organzing my thoughts, or at least getting them down somewhere. I'm forever carrying around a notebook for such thoughts, and forever not using it. I like writing (pen and paper writing) just as much as any other form of technology, but because I'm always on the go, using more up to date technologies makes more sense. In this way, Twitter was helpful. It also made me realize that I complain a LOT about snow and cold weather. This is why my found poem was about my wanting to get out of this weather.

I enjoyed the readings because they were different from each other. It's nice to lose the monotony of ten page reading after ten page reading of academic work. It was also inspiring to see that even though we might write in different lengths, forms and tones, each work can still be powerful in its own way.

I thought it was much easier to take a line from Anzaldua's work and our tweets and use them as inspiration for micro fiction than to use our micro fiction and tweets as texts for haikus and poems. I guess I like the standard pyramid better - starting with a little information and broadening from there. I feel like my creativity is stifled when I can only use so many words to create something new. Don't get me wrong; I enjoy the challenge. Maybe if my tweets had been about more concrete things, I would have had an easier time with my found poem. The common theme among the tweets, however, did make it easy to find a subject for the poem.

I think my favorite reading and writing was the micro fiction. It's not because I hate to write or read long stories. It's more that I feel micro fiction can have such a huge impact on a reader. Because there are so few words, there is more responsibility on the reader's part to piece together the meaning of it. I like texts that make you think. I like texts that stay with you long after you've put them down. Micro fiction to me is a carefully planned snippet of time that's just floating out there, waiting for you to grab it and make it your own. This can be said about any text, of course. There's just something about wanting to be involved in the simplicity of a moment that draws my attention to micro fiction.