By Haley
I honestly can’t believe the semester is coming to an end. I’m writing this while I’m staring at the collection of bags in my room that are ready to go home, as I get ready to move out of my dorm go to Dublin next semester, which is wild, right? But even more than that, I can’t believe that this class is coming to an end.
My absolute favorite thing about this class was the freedom that it gave me to explore the universe that is the Allentown Band. I feel like my passion for research is something that often stays invisible in other classes, but in this one, I could get caught up on tangents researching people or whatever my heart desired, and it was excepted and valued by our little community. Also, I loved the field trips. First, our excursion to Moravian which, even with our mild detour through the streets of Bethlehem in the rain by our slightly confused bus driver, really helped our class come together as a team, and it helped put the world of archiving that we were about to delve into into perspective. Even more so, the field trip to Wenner Hall, where we got our first up close and personal taste of the Allentown band, gave us an invaluable glimpse into the world that we would be retroactively inhabiting for the next two months. Then, the oral histories were a great way to put names to faces. Meeting Beth and DeVaughn and getting to talk to them about their experience helped me gain insight into what it truly is like to be a member of the band. And now, watching all of these pieces come together into our digital story making, I couldn’t be happier or more proud of where we are and where this project is going to continue to go even when I am no longer part of it.
The part of this class that fell short for me was the beginning. Until that day, however strange it was, in GQ, when we walked around and started to write observations of the people there and think deeply about the implications of those observations in the second month of class, I didn’t feel a connection to the course material. I was reading about archiving, words like provenance and fons would swirl in my head ephemerally before being replaced the next class with a reading about The Uprising and documentary practices. None of it truly held any weight for me, until that moment in GQ. I wish we had done that sooner and then done the readings to get an understanding of the ethics that we should’ve been observing when we did it. I feel like that would’ve hooked me right from the start.
Honestly, other than that, I’ve had a great time in this class, and I hope that you get to teach this or some iteration of this in the future.
