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.

So far within my individual research for our COPLAC project, I have organized two interviews for next week. One is with Professor Darin Waters, who is in the history department and has a concentration in African American history in the South. He is very familiar with Asheville’s cultural history, and has had family in the area for several generations. His grandfather, Isaiah Rice, had recently had a photography exhibit through our Special Collections archive that essentially documented the African American experience in Asheville in the 1950s. Waters also has a son who started attending UNC Asheville this semester; he has a unique relationship with UNC Asheville as both a faculty member and a parent of a student. He works as an assistant to the Chancellor as well, and has a greater understanding of the inner workings within our university than some.

We also plan on interviewing Gene Hyde, the Special Collections archivist. As our university archivist, in an archive that heavily contains historically valuable documents, photographs, books, and other materials relating to our university’s history, he would be a beneficial perspective to have as part of our documentation of our university.

I’m beginning to experiment with TimelineJS, a program we will be using in our website. I’m less familiar with it than my partner Casey, but have had some experience using it in a history course I’m currently in. It is a useful tool for creating a concise timeline, with access to implementing audio, photographs, and video components in it. We are also working on a visually appealing and clear design for our website. Implementing TimelineJS might be difficult and will definitely be taken into consideration while designing our website’s layout.