{"id":2717,"date":"2017-02-06T08:00:13","date_gmt":"2017-02-06T13:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/?p=2717"},"modified":"2017-02-01T11:00:44","modified_gmt":"2017-02-01T16:00:44","slug":"exploring-faculty-scholarship-seven-years-of-interviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/2017\/02\/exploring-faculty-scholarship-seven-years-of-interviews\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring Faculty Scholarship: Seven Years of Interviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

We invited Christopher Benda, a theological librarian at Vanderbilt Divinity Library, to reflect on seven years of his audio interview series “Authorial Intentions.” Chris first joined the Vanderbilt Library system in 1997 and joined the Divinity Library staff in 2007. He and his colleagues are invaluable resources supporting student and faculty scholarship and research.
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This May will mark the seventh year of Authorial Intentions, a series of interviews with Divinity and GDR faculty about recent or forthcoming publications.\u00a0 The inspiration behind doing these interviews came from the interview series Entitled Opinions<\/a>, which I enjoyed listening to while taking walks or doing household chores.\u00a0 Robert Harrison, the Stanford professor of French and Italian who hosts Entitled Opinions, talks with his guests about all sorts of topics, from African and Caribbean Francophone writers to Wittgenstein.\u00a0 My enjoyment of Harrison\u2019s show led me to think about doing something similar with Divinity School faculty.\u00a0 Desiring a bit more structure than an extemporaneous conversation, I decided to focus on new faculty publications.\u00a0 I would read faculty books, generate a list of questions, and use them to guide the conversation.\u00a0 And that\u2019s how I\u2019ve mostly conducted the interviews.<\/p>\n

The interviews are all audio rather than video \u2013 partly because of my experience listening to Entitled Opinions, partly because someone I consulted on campus asked, \u201cWhat will video get you that audio won\u2019t?\u201d or words to that effect.\u00a0 Nothing that I could think of, so audio it was. \u00a0Anyone can get to the interviews:\u00a0 they\u2019re on the Divinity Library Web site<\/a> as well as in DiscoverArchive<\/a>, Vanderbilt\u2019s institutional repository.\u00a0 A few are in iTunes U; at some point, I\u2019d like them all to be there.<\/p>\n

Last year, I started a second series of interviews, this one called Open Exchanges.\u00a0 Also available on the Divinity Library Web site<\/a> and in DiscoverArchive<\/a>, this interview series focuses on (typically) shorter faculty publications that can be made available online for anyone to read.\u00a0 The impetus for this series is both practical and philosophical:\u00a0 practical in the sense that folks who listen to the interview don\u2019t need to go out of their way (or spend any money) to read the item that the interview is concerned with; philosophical in the sense that many libraries and librarians are advocates of open access publications, and this series is a small way of advocating in that direction.<\/p>\n

The interviews have been helpful for me to get to know faculty work and the faculty themselves.\u00a0 I hope they\u2019ve also been helpful for listeners.\u00a0 Generally speaking, the actual interview process has been uneventful, though one particular interview stands out:\u00a0 it was with a faculty member who was in France at the time, and I was still doing interviews using a Mac laptop (I\u2019ve since moved to a small recorder that\u2019s easier to tote around).\u00a0 We decided to use Skype, and I found some free software to record the interview.\u00a0 Things were going well until the thunderstorm started (on his end).\u00a0 We needed to truncate the interview, and, instead of trying to pick up where we left off, we started all over again.\u00a0 (I only released the finished version.)\u00a0 So far, that\u2019s as exciting as the interview process has gotten \u2013 but I\u2019m hoping that all of the interviews, in their own ways, have been exciting to listen to and learn from.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We invited Christopher Benda, a theological librarian at Vanderbilt Divinity Library, to reflect on seven years of his audio interview series “Authorial Intentions.” Chris first joined the Vanderbilt Library system in 1997 and joined the Divinity Library staff in 2007. He and his colleagues are invaluable resources supporting student and faculty scholarship and research. This…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6212,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[653,257,324,543,31],"class_list":["post-2717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feature","tag-community","tag-graduate-department-of-religion","tag-reading","tag-vanderbilt-divinity-library","tag-vanderbilt-divinity-school"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6212"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2717"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2717\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2721,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2717\/revisions\/2721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}