Learn About Your Setting
You will want to understand the place your setting your story as well as you know your hometown. Look at:
- official websites (city government, visitor's information, Chamber of Commerce)
- local media (local tv news, newspapers)
- or more unofficial sites like Reddit subreddits, Yelp, etc.
Want some official statistics about your place? Try:
- State & County (& City) QuickFactsQuick tables on population, age/race, income, housing, income/poverty, disability and health insurance for towns with at least 5,000 people. From the Census Bureau.
- County Business PatternsFrom the Census Bureau, provides annual data on the number of businesses, employees, etc., by industry as classified by NAICS or SIC code. Data available to the county level.
Listen to First-Person Accounts
Here are some suggestions for collections of first-person accounts or interviews, to better understand a person from different backgrounds/experiences. This is hardly an exhaustive list, but rather designed to get you thinking about hearing different voices.
There is no shortage of individual first-person accounts. Just browse wherever you go to download your favorite podcasts :).
- Fresh Air with Terry Gross
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This is a talk show out of Philadelphia, but in my opinion, Terry Gross is the one of the best interviewers, in that she does not insert herself much in the conversation, and instead lets her guests do most of the talking. She interviews celebrities, politicians, authors, journalists, etc. Search box is at the bottom. You can listen to segments (15 to 45 minutes) back to 2004. - StoryCorps - Stories from People of All Backgrounds & Beliefs
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Archival collection of short first-person stories, usually one person interviewing another. Can search by location, and they have some themed collections. - POV on PBS
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POV broadcasts independently produced documentaries. Their website offers streaming versions for over 100 documentaries, some feature length, while others are shorter. (The StoryCorps videos can be found here as well.)
- Kanopy Streaming Videos This link opens in a new windowThousands of documentaries available for streaming. Can keyword search via the descriptions.
Find Interviews
Assuming that you either you cannot directly interview relevant people, or you want to supplement your in-person interviews, here are some tips on locating interviews in print.
Books
If the book is primarily an interview with a person, or if a large portion of the text consists of interviews with various people, then the book will be given the subject heading [person or type of person] -- Interviews, for example Social workers -- Interviews.
You can try just adding the keyword interviews in the search box, but you will also get results that have the word interviews anywhere in the record. So if you get too many, try narrowing the search to interviews in the subject field. Do this by using Advanced Search.
Magazine, Newspaper or Scholarly Articles in Our Databases
There's no consistent use of the word interviews as a subject heading in our article databases. And just searching interviews brings up too many irrelevant results. I have found that it helps to narrow better if you use the exact phrase "interview* with" instead, along with the person or type of person, and any other themes. (interview* will search interview or interviews.)
ProQuest Central is a good place to start, since it has a large number of articles from newspapers and magazines, along with scholarly journals.
