I have not updated my table of contents or code book because I haven’t had the opportunity to interview anyone else. However I have two interviews and one event that I have planned for this week, and then my porfolio will be slightly thicker and in need of more coding.
As I progress in my interviewing and researching project, I keep coming back to the importance of songwriting in my own life. This Thursday I will be performing at Cowhill (hopefully), which should be really fun. But I think it is also important because I need to go up there and have the experience that these other songwriters have when performing at Cowhill. How does the audience look from the performer’s point of view? How does the audience react? How do I feel? What do I notice most? Etc… I think this will highly influence the outcome of my project if I decide to make it very, very personal.
Also with further research I’ve realized that I need to add more questions to my interview list. Some of them are ones that have to do with performers experience at Cowhill – were you nervous? Were you glad you did it? Would you do it again? How do you think this helped or hindered your writing process? Who encouraged you to perform here? If you had to, could you pinpoint one event in your life that if it hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t be performing at Cowhill? If Cowhill songwriter’s night didn’t exist, would you still perform at other places, in other opportunities? How do you think that this event would differ if set in a larger town, or if people were forced to come to it for a class requirement, ect?
I recognized the lack of these questions as holes in my research, and I’m glad I caught them before conducting too many interviews. I hope that with further research I will delve into this process even more, and learn to pinpoint the important things that I should begin writing about. I would love to start my project now and continue it as I go along. I think that making use of my research journals, field notes and observations, and interviews is very important, and I also want to add in more pictures of the events and of Cowhill itself. I think these will be steps towards a richer, more complete project. Maybe even one worth publishing? Who knows.
