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Frankie:

Hello, I'm happy to see you again. We had the first interview some months ago and now we're here for a second interview. I'm curious how everything is unfolding.
You shared your plans the first time. Have they gone as planned or have you had to make adjustments?

Marek:

Yeah, well we've definitely come across some challenges. For example we have a bunch of magazines that we'd like to scan. Unfortunately, we're not able to do that manually. We've now given that task to a robot. Actually been great, it saves us quite some time. We've been able to scan six thousand pages in about two weeks. Before, we were doing maybe 600 pages a week manually, but now by using this robot it saved a lot of time. So that's a nice change.

With regard to interviewing people, as you know Covid-19 has proven to be a great risk to the elderly. We were concerned that it would disrupt our plans, but we hoped it would be OK. Unfortunately it did indeed happen. We had plans to interview a gentleman and just a week before, he unfortunately caught Corona and unfortunately passed away. So we lost all that that history. Of course we can interview the family, but the information will be reduced greatly. It's better than nothing, but that was very very unfortunate.

We had some pictures that we shared with them. Some from the scanned magazines and they knew a little bit about this, but not as much as the person we had wanted to interview. So that information is now lost.
This made us realize that it's best now that everyone films the information that they know about, themselves. At least that's better than nothing. We also have some information, some videos on VHS that we're able to digitize. But you know, we can't look through a magic ball and see what's going to happen in the future so we thought it's best to record their information now just in case.
Also due to lockdowns that have had a great impact on our planning, we realize that if we're not able to meet in person that we can at least meet online. It's better than nothing, because in case someone does unfortunately pass away or we're not able to interview them in the future, we can at least interview them online so that's been quite a challenge until now.

Frankie:

Oh I can imagine that hasn't been easy. If you have plan a, you indeed need to quickly revert to plan b. It's best to interview everyone now because there's such a risk and nowadays. That's quite difficult.
Thanks for sharing that with us. In regards to scanning the magazines, how do you plan to use those in your exhibition?

Marek:

Yeah, the magazines focus on people's experiences, the Deaf people's experiences during the communist time, because that was from 1972 to 2012. First we were Czechoslovakia, this was the sign name. And then in 1985, the communist rule ended and in 1993 we split. We became the Czech Republic and Slovakia. So we split our ways, but we have a lot of materials that belong to both of us. So after scanning all of these magazines, we want to make those available for the Deaf Community, for hearing people, for sign language users, for anyone who is looking at our Deaf history.

There's so much information there. Actually many young people think: "Oh, it is better now, than it used to be." But actually, if you look at the magazines, there's some great articles about how socially they were so active and how people came together, a lot more than today.
We also have some events that have been officially published. You know, video relay services actually already existed here in the 1980s. We have a publication on that, you can see a picture of two screens and a big television. Many people don't know that, but because it's been published about, luckily we have access to that information. I don't know how it's going to be now that everything is digitized, but it's nice to have things officially published and recognized.

Frankie:

Wow, that's interesting. It's interesting to see that there's so many things that happened, that you can look back at.
Like video relay service, who knew?
It makes you wonder what other things we don't know about in the past.
What has been the most difficult challenge that you faced in your work on the exhibition?

Marek:

The most difficult thing for us is actually to narrow down what we want to focus on. We have so many reels of video and we have so many articles that we can go through, but we just need to narrow it down. It takes a lot of time to go through all of the materials. We have videos of two to three hours, and you need to cut it down to a very small clip. Also there are so many magazine articles, that going through them all takes so much time. I think that's the most difficult part: the time it takes, and how time consuming it is to go through all the materials. So for us, gathering the materials wasn't so difficult, it's actually narrowing it down to the topics that we want to focus on.

Frankie:

When you end up choosing a clip, how do you feel about the all the information you don't end up using? That end up on the cutting room floor? Will do you save that or will you use it for another topic?

Marek:

Indeed it really depends on the topic that we focus on, for example we are focusing on World War II. So if there is information about other topics, we just put that to the side. We definitely don't throw it away. Maybe there is a another project that will want to focus on other topics that we found. So in that way, we're trying to figure out how to go through the materials. There are also materials that are quite sensitive and we're not sure if we should share that publicly or not.

Frankie:

Oh, goodness yeah. Just like you said in your first interview: never get rid of materials or archive materials, because sometimes it can be used for other projects or other stories. Do you have any last comments or advice for people that like to undertake the same type of project you're undertaking?

Marek:

One bit of advice is to plan well, but also have a plan b, and a plan c, and a plan d.

Just like  us. We unfortunately had the situation where the person that we wanted to interview passed away. So we had to think of other ways to get information from the family. You also need to think of copyright situations. You also need to think about
what information you want to display. I think it's best to have a focus, or a theme that you want to focus on. And then you can go through your materials accordingly. If you don't have a certain theme that you
focus on, it's going to be difficult to go through all the information and choose the right things. It's definitely important to make sure you have a lot of information available to choose from. That way you have more choice.

Frankie:

That's also a good point. If you don't have enough information, if you only start with very little information, then you don't have much to choose from. So it's best to start with a lot of materials and go from there. I'm very curious to see how this will further unfold.

We will see you next time!

Thank you.

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