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七月项目回顾
July Program Review
Aug 6th, 2024
I got a quite busy July, so that I could hardly keep my research log updated in the last month. After the holiday trip, I went back to Wenzhou on July 13th and punctually started the 2-week Drinks for Stories program as planned. With a small site in the holiday hotel and a pile of invitation cards, the interviews with Wenzhou residents began.
初始阶段 The Initial Stage
在最初的三天里，我与八个人进行了交谈，大多数事情都进展顺利。与之前的担忧不同，找到受访者并非难事： 当我与受访者建立联系并进行谈话后，他们往往会向我推荐一些他们认为擅长讲故事的人。
同时，我没有把自己限制在酒店一角，而是尝试在酒店内四处走动——例如在酒店室外的游泳池旁，有一些家长会为了照看孩子而闲坐在那里，或者开车到周边的陶瓷博物馆和咖啡馆进行实地考察和采访。
Most things went smoothly in the first three days, during which I conducted conversations with 8 people. In contrast to previous concerns, it was not hard to find people: When I built the connection with my interviewees, they tended to recommend someone else who they thought to be a good storyteller.
Simultaneously, I did not physically confine myself in my base. I tried to move around in the hotel (e.g. next to the outdoor swimming pool where some parents stayed to take care of their children) or drove to different places (e.g. the ceramic museum, coffee house) for site visits and interviews.
指导课 The Tutorial
然而在这个过程中，我还遇到了一些问题，我在 7 月 16 日的线上指导课上与导师讲述了这些困惑：
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我怎样才能使自己的态度变得更加中立？
我发现自己对不同的受访者有不同程度的偏好。虽然我可以在采访过程中控制自己的行为，但我不确定自己是否能在采访后平等地处理所有数据。
导师的建议是无需太担心这个问题。这些访谈的作用应该是成为档案的基础，使得更多人对这个项目提起兴趣，并输出他们的故事或意见。不管我喜欢与否，不同的观点随着项目的发展最终都会被收录到档案中。
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如何说服人们讲述自己的故事和经历，而不仅仅是分享他们所知道的知识或理论？
有些人认为自己没有受过良好的教育，或拥有的是理工科背景，因此觉得自己没有能力谈论这个话题。导师建议我做一些不同的尝试：尝试提出不同的问题以获得最佳回答，尝试使用不同的方式而不是访谈来收集数据，例如放置一些纸张让酒店客人留下他们的故事。
此外，导师也建议我提前在七月份购买域名来生成在线档案，这可以帮助我与受访者分享更多关于我的项目的信息。然而，当时的我觉得自己已经超负荷工作，很难实现这一点。
The process was still accompanied with some questions, which I shared during the tutorial on July 16th:
- How can I become more neutral?
I found that I had different levels of preference toward different interviewees. Even though I could control my behavior during the interview, I was not sure that I could treat all the data equally afterwards.
The tutor’s suggestion, based on my understanding, was to be less worried about this problem. The function of these interviews should be the base of the archive, so that more people will present their interest in this project and output their stories or opinions. Whether I like or not, different viewpoints will be included in the archive in the future eventually.
- How to persuade people to tell their own stories and experiences, rather than just sharing the knowledge or theories they know?
Some people, identifying themselves not that well-educated or with science and engineering background, just felt that they were not capable of talking about this topic. The tutor recommended me to try something differently: try to ask different questions for best responses and try to use different ways to collect data rather than interviews, for example, to place some paper for hotel guests to leave their stories.
Besides, I was suggested to buy the domain to generate the online archive in July in advance, which could help me to share more about my project with my interviewees. However, I felt I had been overloaded and could hardly achieve this T-T.
调整与实践 Adjustment and Practice
由于我并不是每天都驻扎在酒店里，放置一些空白纸张以便其他人留下记录可能是收集更多数据的好方法。
因此，我尝试在我每次离开前调整现场的布置，在桌面上放置空白纸张、档案员信息收集卡和参与者同意书，并请咖啡吧的同事帮忙收集客人填好内容的纸张，并提供给他们自选饮品。
Since I was not staying in the hotel everyday, placing some blank paper for leaving notes might be a good way to collect more data.
Therefore, I attempted to reorganize the site when I was not there (with the blank paper, archivist information collection cards and the participant consent forms), and asked the help from the colleagues in the coffee bar to trade free drinks for the filled blank paper.
然而，这样的设置并没有吸引到好故事，反而吸引了很多孩子在信息收集卡上涂鸦，这或许也是收集到的档案中意想不到的好素材……
However, rather than stories, this setting attracted more children to doodle on the information collection cards, which might also be an unexpected good element for the archive construction…
此外，我还尝试向参与者提出不同的问题。尽管很难设定一个适用于所有人的固定问题列表，但我发现从 “你能介绍一下你的工作吗 ”这个问题开始，是了解人们生活的好方法。话题不会局限于工作，而是自然而然地延伸到早年的学生时代、家庭、爱好甚至生活态度。
In addition, I experimented on asking different questions to my participants. Even though it was hard to set a fixed question list applicable to everyone, I found starting with the question “Can you introduce your job(s)” was a good way to get people’s life stories. The topic would not be restricted in work, but naturally flowed to early school years, families, hobbies and even attitude toward lives.
后期阶段的困难 Difficulty in the Late Stage
我最初的目标是收集 40-50 人的数据，但实际人数是 32 人。渐渐地，我觉得这个密集的采访阶段消耗了我太多的精力，原因可能有两个。
首先，我低估了每次访谈所耗费的时间。在实际执行中，每个被采访者大约需要花费一个小时的时间，这比我预计的多了一倍。其次，我高估了自己作为一个内向者与不同的人进行多次长时间谈话的承受上限。
因此，我在后半期放慢了访谈速度，让自己有一些时间充电的同时，也在家乡进行些许“观光”活动，拍了少量照片作为档案的补充。
My first target was to collect the data from 40-50 people, but the actual number was 32. Gradually, I felt this intense interview period consumed too much of my mental energy, probably because of two reasons.
First, I underestimated the time consumed for each interview. It cost approximately one hour for each interviewee in real practice, which was twice as much as I expected. Second, I overestimated my capacity in having many long conversations with different people as an introvert.
As the result, I slowed down my pace in conducting the interviews in the second half of the period, which allowed myself to have some breaks by “sightseeing” in my hometown and taking some photos as supplements to the archive.