Our first interview with Dr. Lisa Eikholdt is scheduled for this Thursday afternoon through Zoom. We will be recording the webcast interview and putting clips of the video on our website, along with a full transcript. While Avery has been the point of contact for Dr. Eikholdt, he has class during the time she had available to speak with us, so I will be conducting the interview in his place. We created our list of questions for Dr. Eikholdt last week, and I will be using this list to guide my discussion with her. Our interview questions center around gaining perspective on three key elements: 1. The case itself, 2. Community response/debate surrounding the challenge, and 3. General opinion on book censorship. Because of Dr. Eikholdt’s experience both as an educator and as an active participant in the Gwinnett County case, we hope to get her unique insight on the case in these particular areas. We are also hoping that this interview will offer an alternative point of view to Mallory and the Gwinnet County School system as the case’s two primary players. Dr. Eikholdt was involved enough with the case to remember it and give feedback— she is prominent enough a player, in fact, that Laura Mallory mentions her several times in post-case interviews—but is not so heavily associated with the case that she cannot speak freely about it.
In addition to preparing a set of questions for Dr. Eikholdt, Avery and I have also prepared for our interview by discussing our format and how we will incorporate the footage into our website. As I mentioned earlier, we are planning to use Zoom for our web interview with Dr. Eikholdt. I feel fairly comfortable with Zoom, especially considering the fact that we have used this technology for all of our class sessions this semester, but am a little wary running the software on my own and correctly capturing our footage without any glitches. To hopefully circumvent any of these technical difficulties, Avery and I are planning on conducting a practice interview on Zoom this Wednesday during our normal class block, since the entire group will not be meeting during this time. Along with testing out the technology, practicing ahead of time will give us the chance to air out our questions and determine if we need to adjust them or add anything before our official interview. Once we have our recorded interview with Dr. Eikholdt, we will head into the process of editing the footage. I plan on transcribing the full audio before we make any cuts, so that we have a complete record of the entire conversation.
After we have edited the interview to our desired length/pared it down to the most important details, we will put it on the “Community Response” sub-page under our Case tab. Depending on how much information we get from Dr. Eikholdt and/or how much we decide to incorporate additional statements from community members, we might create a separate sub-page dedicated to Dr. Eikholdt’s involvement in particular, but at the moment we plan to have only one page on this aspect of our project. With these plans in place, both Avery and I are prepared for and excited about conducting our first interview this week.