Categorizing Recollections

From a screen capture of my tagging process, in progress.

Our research team is now onto the final phases of conducting oral history interviews for the Passage project. We have so far collected interviews from 15 individuals who represent a cross-section of the ethnic minority community in Hong Kong—including social entrepreneurs, families, artists, teachers with roots in Africa and across Asia.

Part of my job as a composer for the musical work based on the oral history recordings is to honor their memories while drawing surprising connections between them—between folks who may have never met in real life and possibly never will, and to show the common themes among the interviews. I listen to each one and excerpt possible snippets that I might include in the piece. I tag each snippet with keywords that help me surface these interviews later by theme. I enter everything into a relational database system and hope for the best.

And, to be sure, the research team asks similar questions at each interview: tell me about your relationship to Hong Kong, (for those who came here from another place) tell me about how you arrived in Hong Kong and why you decided to stay, tell me about your impressions of Hong Kong. I just started snippet-ing and tagging the sixth interview recording. What strikes me is that, even though we ask similar questions, our interviewees provide such different responses. At the same time, they are also connected by a few common themes—looking for opportunities, finding success, taking risks, appreciating the present—and often in surprising ways.

More to follow.