StoryCorps is an organization that is striving to record both America’s and the world’s stories. It began in New York in 2003 as a StoryBooth, but in 2005 StoryCorps began airing on National Public Radio (NPR) with the intent to share people’s stories. This Thanksgiving StoryCorps is launching The Great Thanksgiving Listen.
The Great Thanksgiving Listen is targeting students to record the stories of their grandparents and older generations in their community, and then take a picture with them.
“If we can pull this off, it will create a very powerful and important bottom-up history, history through our voices, through our family’s voices and stories of the last 75, 80, 90 years of United States history,” StoryCorps founder Dave Isay said.
According to NPR’s website, StoryCorps has recorded 65,000 interviews. Each story recorded with permission is archived in the StoryCorps archives and a small selection of the interviews year round are edited, airing on NPR’s morning edition.
StoryCorps has provided a toolkit for students and teachers to explain the pilot program. According to the toolkit StoryCorps released, The Great Thanksgiving Listen could make the StoryCorps archive the biggest collection of human voice recordings ever before.
The Great Thanksgiving Listen hopes for students in their sophomore and junior social studies classes to be assigned by their teachers to record their family and friends this Thanksgiving. To record the stories of family or friends, go to the app store and download the free StoryCorps app.
The StoryCorps app has a sidebar including the option of viewing self recorded interviews, browsing others interviews, an explanation on how it works, hints to help get started and information about StoryCorps. To prepare for an interview the app allows it’s users to pick the questions to ask, who will be interview and the time that will be spent recording the interview.
StoryCorps has selected a range of questions for The Great Listen, list can be composed of their pre-made questions or gives the option to create question. It will begin complying the selected questions in list to make the interviewing process easier. They have other categories of questions including anything warm-up questions to military questions.
Once all the questions have been chosen wish to ask, StoryCorps prompts you to include information about who you will be interviewing, though it is not required. The length of interviews are 15, 30 and 40 minutes, and although it’s possible to go over, the app will stop at 45 minutes.
Record history, download the app, and talk with your relatives this Thanksgiving.