Witness

So, the interviewing process is now over for this year of Witness (we’ve collected over a dozen interviews – thanks in advance to all our generous interviewees). Our volunteers are currently concentrating on their degree work (various deadlines looming), but we’ll be cracking on after Easter – recruiting next year’s volunteers, keywording the interviews, and beginning to write the collaborative report. Then in the summer, there’ll be further exciting developments…

Our volunteers have had a cracking start to the year, with our interview collection growing all the time – our thanks to all these interviewees.  The plan now is to stop interviewing by the end of the month, so that the volunteers can pause to reflect on what they’ve recorded, and starting thinking about writing a public report….

The first few interviews have now been uploaded onto an internal network, so our volunteers can get to work on them. And we’ve had good news about the summer, too – so 2012 is going well for Witness!

We’ve been really pleased with the responses we received following our formal launch last month. Thanks very much to everyone who’s got in touch with us, whether currently living in Sheffield or from further afield. It’s looking like we won’t be able to interview all those who kindly put themselves forward this year, but we very much hope they’ll agree to be ‘on the book’ for next and future years.

Our volunteers have now scheduled the first few interviews for the end of this month, so watch this space for further updates…

The volunteers on the Witness project have now had their oral history training, and we’re about to start collecting interviews. The overarching theme is ‘Life in Sheffield in the 1980s’, but more specifically, we’re particularly interested in the following 1980s topics:

• local government
• bonds of community
• life at home
• the music scene
• looking for work
• attitudes to the Cold War
• organised sport
• social cohesion

If you’d like to be interviewed on any these topics, or could put us in contact with people who would, please get in touch: witness at sheffield.ac.uk

A preliminary meeting with the Witnesses: and we’ve selected our theme! We’re going with the ‘Life in Sheffield in the 1980s’ as a way into the history of Sheffield in the 1980s – this fitted best with the volunteers’ own interests.

It’s nearly time for the summer holidays, so there won’t now be much to report until September, when the project starts again in earnest….

The call for volunteers amongst our first-year historians elicited a fantastic response – more than we could give places to. Now there’s now a ten-strong Witness team, who’ll be starting their work in the autumn. But we’re hoping to specify the theme of enquiry within the next couple of weeks!

This is the first post on what Andrew Heath and I hope will be an exciting scheme – a new oral history project for students at the Department of History at the University of Sheffield. We’ve consulted to see whether people think it’s a good idea, and now we’ve put out our call for volunteers, so we just have to sit back and wait…