Instructors: Gregory L. Sharrow, VFC Director of Education and Andy Kolovos, VFC Archivist.

Oral history is a powerful tool for engaging with collective memory, identifying shared values, and understanding how human beings draw on the past to inform action in the present.

Intended for students, community members, staff members of non-profit cultural, community and social-service agencies interested in ethnographic interviewing for oral history research.

This class provides insight into the role of oral history in cultural sustainability, the theories underpinning oral history research, and hands-on training in oral history interview techniques. The class begins with a demonstration interview followed by group discussion of the ethnographic interview process. Attendees will then work as teams to conduct interviews with invited guests using provided digital audio recording equipment. The day concludes with reflection on interviewing and a discussion of project ideas.

Instructor: Andy Kolovos, VFC Archivist.

Audio is a powerful medium for capturing human experience and human expression. In the context of cultural sustainability efforts, audio is an extremely useful tool for documenting local knowledge, exploring values and perceptions, and building resources for understanding and supporting cultural practices.

Intended for students, community members, staff members of non-profit cultural, community and social-service agencies, as well as professional researchers interested in learning more about audio recording options, this class will provide a basic introduction to the use of contemporary digital audio recording equipment in the context of ethnographic and oral history interviews.

Attendees will receive a thorough introduction to the fundamentals of digital audio, types of common field-recording microphones, and the use of flash-memory based audio recorders. The workshop includes hands-on exercises with equipment in an actual interview setting. We will use the Marantz PMD660 for these exercises, but the fundamental skills demonstrated will be applicable to most currently available digital audio recorders. In addition to the use of this equipment, we will also cover the selection and purchase of professional digital audio recording gear.

Instructors: Gregory L. Sharrow, VFC Director of Education and Andy Kolovos, VFC Archivist.

Ethnography — in particular participant observation and interviewing — offers a means to explore the ways in which people understand and experience the world, and brings into view the multiple perspectives that define community. In the context of cultural sustainability, ethnographic research methods provide important tools for working with communities to understand what people most value about the places in which they live, and to identify and explore the key cultural practices that define who they are.

Intended for students, community members, staff members of non-profit cultural, community and social-service agencies interested in exploring the inner workings of communities and organizations.

In this day-long class we outline the ethnographic method for drawing out the keepers of community knowledge and capturing the important stories of everyday life. The class is structured around discussion, viewing and listening to ethnographic documentaries, and hands-on experience visiting pre-arranged field observation sites in the village of Middlebury. The class concludes with time for additional discussion and reflection.

Instructor: Ned Castle, Photographer

Photography is a tool for both exploring the world and expressing something meaningful about that exploration. When approached from an ethnographic perspective, photography is a powerful resource for collaborative engagement with individuals and communities interested in presenting, documenting, and understanding their cultural practices.

Intended for students, community members, staff members of non-profit cultural, community and social-service agencies, as well as professional researchers interested in learning more about digital photography technique and its use in ethnography, this workshop will provide instruction in the technical aspects of photography and examine the role of the camera as a window though which the researcher views the world.

Instruction in basic to advanced photographic techniques will be merged with ethnographic field research concepts. Workshop attendees will learn how to engage their surroundings consciously, thoughtfully, and photographically—in that order. Hands-on experience will be provided as attendees conduct their own "photo-ethnographic" documentary projects. There will also be time for reflection and critique of student work.

Instructor: Erica Heilman, Radio Producer.

Audio stories have the capacity to open a window into another world. Through audio documentary, stories can be broadcast on radio, streamed online, or used to transform a standing exhibit. Inexpensive — even free — audio editing tools make it easy for individuals and communities to create rich and provocative audio documentaries, podcasts, and short pieces that can be distributed via the internet.

This two-day workshop will give participants the skills to begin telling their own stories through audio. It will also illuminate the various ways in which field recordings can be transformed into aural narratives that can convey cultural knowledge and practices, perspectives, and values. The “Creating Audio Documentaries” workshop combines hands-on experience with classroom discussion to guide participants through the creation of an audio documentary. After learning how to use the audio recording equipment, participants will hit the streets of Middlebury to conduct “vox-populi” (voice of the people) interviews. Back in the classroom, they will use these recordings as raw material to edit short audio pieces. By the end of two days, attendees will leave with the skills to begin working on their own sound documentaries at home.

This workshop is intended for students, community members, staff members of non-profit cultural, community, and social-service agencies, as well as professional researchers interested in learning more about digital audio editing. Basic computer skills are required, but no editing experience is necessary. Although the workshop is taught using Apple Macintosh computers and software, the fundamental skills developed will be transferable to any audio editing platform.

Instructor: Scott Miller, Videographer.

This intensive two-day workshop gives participants the opportunity to create a short multi-media documentary project from start to finish. We begin with conceptualizing the piece, and end with publishing it digitally. We cover ethics, aesthetics, and technique before developing a project and producing it.

With historic Middlebury, Vermont as our location, we will use photography, video and audio recording to create a unique and artistic media piece that reflects the character of the place, the values of the local residents, and the aesthetics of the filmmakers.

Day One: The first morning the group will decide on a topic and then create a project structure, leading to a storyboard, to plan how various media pieces (still images, audio, and moving images) will blend to form the piece. In the afternoon we will go outside and work in teams recording around town; some shooting stills, others pursuing interviews, others recording ambient audio or shooting video.

Day Two: This day will be dedicated to editing our project using FInal Cut Pro. Familiarity with the software and Macintosh computers is recommended, but not required. We will work in groups of two to edit individual aspects of the project, as decided on our original storyboard. By the afternoon we will reconvene to put the components together and upload our finished piece onto Vimeo for the world to see.

Instructor: Andy Kolovos, VFC Archvist.

Digital cameras and digital audio and video recorders provide researchers and community members with powerful tools to document, understand, and present cultural practices and human experience. However, ensuring that the digital materials created with these tools persist over time is a monumental challenge. Digital preservation, as archivists and librarians refer to it, begins before you even turn on your camera or recorder, and is an ongoing process of continual engagement with your digital resources over time.

Aimed at individual ethnographic and oral history researchers, family historians, local historical societies, local libraries, small repositories, and staff at non-profit cultural, community and social-service organizations, this class presents a review of the current best practices for keeping--and keeping track of--digital multimedia files with the goal of preserving access to their content over the long term.

We will address the practical basics of digital preservation including recommended file formats and storage options, de-mystify seemingly esoteric concepts like "metadata," and help attendees understand practical solutions to the thorny problems of sustaining digital resources.