DeContextualizing

Thinking about this project in context has been difficult for me lately. I find myself often lost in the reasoning and meaning behind the words, so much that I miss the importance of the words themselves. All of our contextualizing(not to de-emphasize it, Pavel), has drawn my focus almost exclusively on reading between the lines, but ignoring the lines themselves. This is particularly frustrating because the focus of the experience is the collection of words. I find myself getting lost trying to decipher intentions, subjectivity, context. But all of these things are FRAMEwork; not intended to be the focal point of the picture, simply something pretty to hang around it and accentuate its colors. The point of oral history is not to get lost in all the interesting nuances and semantics involving in "decoding" the historical document(interview), but rather to collect and preserve the historical document itself. Keeping this in the forefront of my mind will help me contextualize it as well, for a painter does not create the frame before he has finished painting his picture.