Ugh where to begin? Well we have been working otgether trying to figure out the research portion of this project but we havent really been getting anywhere. Once we finally came up with a plan of what we were going to do, our professor made us realize that we were focusing too much on the economical issues rather than the food itself. awesome. So from there we got rid of everything we were doing and bascially started from scratch. We came up with a new idea that none of us know anything about, Slow Food Movement.

We are meeting today in class to discuss the new topic with the teacher and we plan to get moving on the project while in class. Hopefully this topic is more on the right track compared to our last topic. I am so thankful that we got an extension on the due date since we are starting over!  

Earlier this week I met with Breanne and we worked on the transcription of one of the interviews. I had planned to edit the video and repost it but I did not know how to take the video from youtube and open it in windows movie maker. So since we couldnt figure it out we sat down together in my apartment and listened to everything Mr Butt had to say. It was interesting to hear the interview since I didnt get to be there in person. Also, it was funny that most of the answers that he gave werent really closely related to our main topic question, which made Breanne and I think that we may have to change the big question up a little bit.

Since the time we met we uploaded the other interview and the editted version and the intro and closing paragraphs. The oral history part of the assignment is basically completed and now we are going to work on the research part.

I plan to go to class with Breanne, Casey, and Lauren next week so I can work on the project with them!

This project seems to be on the bottom of my list of things to do lately and I am not exactly sure why. I was unable to interview either of the sources due to suprise circumstances, and I am actually really upset about it. I was really looking forward to meeting with Lauren and Breanne to do the second interview. Well since I didn't get to interview and I was forced to take my roommate to the airport last Thursday when the group met to edit videos, I didnt get a chance to help. I have asked for them to email me the videos so I can play with them and edit them on Windows Movie Maker becuase I spand a lot of time on there making videos so I am hoping to receive an email sooner or later. Aside from that, we have all been working on the annotated bibliography. Today I added two more sources but I am not sure that I formatted them right. Not to mention the one source I added was not a written article, it was a website in general about being a supporter of locally owned businesses.

I am looking forward, again, to working with my group to get all the pieces together and get this project moving along. I wish that I was in their class so that meeting up and working on this would be easier. Or I wish that someone would sit in my row in my classroom so that I could have had a group in my own class. I guess when I told them that I have barely any friends at school they wanted to join the group of Brittany Avoiders! LAME.

I typed our research question into google and this is information on the website that I clicked on. our research question, if you forgot, is Is it worth supporting local business financially? health wise? time wise? 

Here is the website information:

1.  Local Character and Prosperity: In an increasingly homogenized world, communities that preserve their one-of-a-kind businesses and distinctive character have an economic advantage.

2.  Community Well-Being: Locally owned businesses build strong communities by sustaining vibrant town centers, linking neighbors in a web of economic and social relationships, and contributing to local causes.

3. Local Decision-Making: Local ownership ensures that important decisions are made locally by people who live in the community and who will feel the impacts of those decisions.
 
4.  Keeping Dollars in the Local Economy: Compared to chain stores, locally owned businesses recycle a much larger share of their revenue back into the local economy, enriching the whole community.

5.  Job and Wages: Locally owned businesses create more jobs locally and, in some sectors, provide better wages and benefits than chains do.
 
6.  Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship fuels America's economic innovation and prosperity, and serves as a key means for families to move out of low-wage jobs and into the middle class.

7.  Public Benefits and Costs: Local stores in town centers require comparatively little infrastructure and make more efficient use of public services relative to big box stores and strip shopping malls.

8.  Environmental Sustainability: Local stores help to sustain vibrant, compact, walkable town centers-which in turn are essential to reducing sprawl, automobile use, habitat loss, and air and water pollution.

9.  Competition: A marketplace of tens of thousands of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term.

10.  Product Diversity: A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based, not on a national sales plan, but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.

Technology always seems to find a way to put a damper on things. Today Lauren set up an interview with our second person and did the interview and then realized there were complications with the camera that she had used. Therefore, tomorrow Breanne, Lauren, and I are going to rerecord the interview. I am really glad I am able to attend this interview since Casey interviewed the first person and I wasnt able to attend. I couldnt go today either so I am interested in hearing what the interviewee has to say to us tomorrow evening.

It's been interesting hearing the different things that this research project is bringing up in class and in my life. I have noticed that I have been reading labels more and spreading the word on some of the things we viewed in Food Inc (yuck). Although it is unsatisfying to learn about what we truly are eating, it is very interesting.

By today, one of our two interviews have taken place. Some of the questions that we included were :
possible interview questions:

-how long were you in the business?
-did you inherit it?
-how many employees do you have?
-where does the food come from? is it trustworthy?
-where is the food stored?
-what happens to the leftovers?
-how is food prepared?
-who are your typical customers?
-hours? days off? holidays off?
-what time of day do you bring in most revenue?
-are nutrition facts readily available?
-how much do you know about the food?

So far we have researched Casey's boyfriends dad who is a deli owner and the other possible interviewee is wither Lauren's friend who is manager of McDonalds or a cook from the restaurant/fast food place, Five Guys.

Today I met with the three other girls in my group to discuss our oral history/collab research project. We tried to come up with a main topic but we had so many sub topics. Eventually we came to the conclusion that we wanted to research if it was worth the time, money, and heath to go to locally owned businesses compared to big corporations.

We kept discussing which was healthier becuase you would think that the smaller busniess would be healthier but really we do not know that without researching it.

We planned out who we were going to interview and it is starting to really come together!

Should access to healthy food be a right for everyone?

How has the quality of food and they way it is prepared changed over time?

Are there any healthier substitutes for corn?

Since Kevin's Law has the number of fatalities due to mass production gone down, gone up, or stayed the same?

What effect does college have on weight gain?

Is it actually better for your body to become a vegetarian or vegan?

Are school lunches in the United States nutritious?

How much false visual advertising exists in the fast food corporations?

What is used to make the photos look so nice? Is it even the real food?

What is organic? What does it mean?

This past week, well now about a week and a half ago, we were given two things to read over our spring break unless we did it before we left but lets be real, why do something ahead of time? pshh!
So these readings were about oral history, which is spoken and out loud, you know? Well in the first reading, What is Oral History? the main point is that speaking about things is important to pass on information in history. Oral history can be attained through story, simple communication, and mostly interviews. Towards the end they stress how to have a good interview and I found this quote to be important and useful for the future. "The best interviews have a measured, thinking-out-loud quality, as perceptive questions work and rework a particular topic, encouraging the narrator to remember details, seeking to clarify that which is muddled, making connections among seemingly disconnected recollections, challenging contradictions, evoking assessments of what it all meant then and what it means now. "

The second reading, Like it Was, again is about oral history and conducting interviews. This chapter was filled with information to help one write a biography on someone. It helps you to determine who exactly you want to interview and what types of questions to ask. They included practical tips for interviewing and I thought that all of this information is going to be very useful and I plan to go back to this site frequently to get ideas.

This article was very long and I am not sure that I remained focused throughout the entire thing, but I did manage to pick four quotes out from it to help define narrative inquiry. The first quote that I chose was pretty self explanitory and I bet many classmates also picked this quote.
1. "The four include the following: (1) a change in the relationship between the person conducting the research and the person participating as the subject (the relationship between the researcher and the researched), (2) a move from the use ofnumber toward the use of words as data,(3) a change from a focus on the general and universal toward the local and specific,and finally (4) a widening in acceptance of alternative epistemologies or ways of knowing." This basically states that there are a few different ways to write narrative inquiries.

2. "Within the framework of narrative research, researchers use a number of research approaches, strategies, and methods". I like this quote beucase they allow the reader to see that it is not simply handed to them. you must research and use different strategies to come up with the appropriate information.

3. "When the audience of research is presented
with numeric findings, the reader must provide a narrative to explain and capture the relationships presented with statistical values." To me, this quote is sayin that formulas, charts, graphs, and tables are too distracting for the reader and take up too much time and they should be avoided?

4. "What distinguishes narrative inquirers is their desire to understand rather than control and predict the human world." This kinda summed up the article. Narrative inquirers do all this research to understand and better write rather than simply predicting what they think happened or will happen.