This week, my partner Casey and I completed our first interview with Dr. Darin Waters in UNC Asheville’s history department. Despite some technical issues with the mic (having to resort to recording the audio on an iPhone) we had a very fruitful discussion. Waters delved into not only his position as a professor at UNC Asheville, but also his relationship with the university while growing up in Asheville from the 1970s and onward. He also discussed the benefits of the dynamic of a liberal arts college both for students and for professors, as well as how the structure affected how he taught. He compared working in UNC Asheville to working at UNC Chapel Hill, a traditional research university. Overall, Waters gave my partner and me great insight in both the perspective of a UNCA professor and as a resident of the city our school is based in.

Two interviews we have lined up for next week are with Gene Hyde and Colin Reeve, the archivist in our Special Collections archive. I’d asked Gene, who is also my boss, about being interviewed; his relationship with the history of our university and with the communal interest in our university’s archival materials seemed pertinent to our project. He agreed, and also suggested I interview Colin as well, as he played a role in curating and digitizing a large part of our collections specifically related to the university.

We are also considering interviewing Greg Dillingham, Distance Learning Services Manager at UNC Asheville. Having worked directly with digital courses in ou university, his perspective with working with students in digital courses seemed relevant to the discussion of digital learning and the liberal arts. Anne Ogg, the instructional designer in Ramsey Library, helps students working with digital tools such as TimelineJS. She has been teaching courses to classes about how to create digital projects in several departments, and is also an individual we are considering contacting about an interview.