Blog 6: Transcription thoughts and random information

Blog 6

For Zine 1

In line with our class discussion, I shortened my paragraph on origins of the market and suggested a couple of sentences to add to the one about the fire.  I await the next draft with great interest.

 

Stacey Pack Interview

I listened to the Stacey Pack interview with the goal of finding some pull quotes and then transcribing them.  The act of transcription made me notice particularly how much spoken language differs from written language.  Although she is quite articulate, there are a lot of false starts where she is self-editing as she goes.  She does say “you know” but not as frequently as some people.  I understand from Dr. King that one transcribes verbatim, but it is possible to clean up the text when quoting it later.

I transcribed 5 quotes about the following:  1) the plan for the outdoor space which is (in part) to create a farmers market; 2) goals for the market (from presentation to Foodpac); 3) a discussion about what’s important in redesigning the market, balancing the desire to keep some of the old ambiance against current needs of customers; 4) how to use the market as community space; 5) a desire to respond to all the competing demands.  I put them in a new folder on the shared drive called Possible Pull Quotes.

Stacey Pack is clearly used to public speaking and being interviewed.  Some of her answers covered familiar territory – such as the lengthy description of the process in answer to the question about the park.   There were moments of spontaneity, but for the most part she seemed to be speaking from her role as market manager.  I admired Calvin’s way of asking difficult questions in a low-key, non-confrontational way.    

I just finished reading the master plan report which included information about how they gathered data, including both interviews with market customers and an internet survey.   Reading the data from their interviews made me think about the difference between interviews designed to collect standard data and what we are doing – more ethnographic or oral history.  They had standard questions because they wanted to be able to compile and analyze statistical patterns.  Our interviews will allow more opportunity for follow-up questions and non-standard responses.  This means we won’t be able to do multi-colored bar charts but, hopefully, will be able to offer something more in-depth about the relation of the community to the market both as food source and as a public space.

Random Information

I have a neighbor who works in the city planning department so I asked him about Lexington Market, particularly whether he knew what was going on about the plan.  Although he didn’t know much, he told me that he had been part of a process a couple of years ago to do a Health Impact Assessment of the westside downtown.  (He is going to see if he can get me a copy.)  But he made two interesting points about the neighborhood from the perspective of a planner.  First was that it is a particularly difficult neighborhood to plan for because it has two relatively non-intersecting populations – the lower income black population and the rather transient UM medical people.   Although they share the space, it is hard to find ways to build community structures which serve them both.   Second, one of the goals of the impact assessment process is to look for possible unintended consequences of changes.  For example, data suggests that moving from attended toll booths to ez-pass tolls reduces pollution-related disease in the area because cars aren’t idling as long in a limited area.   In the case of the Baltimore study, they discussed whether dislodging the drug-using population from around the market might create worse health outcomes because people with drug-related problems would be further from the health services provided by the UM.