Oral History
I don't think you can fully rely on "oral" history. I remember playing the game Telephone in elementary school. We'd get in a circle and a person would whisper something like "I love pie" to the person to his left. That person was supposed to whisper to the guy on his left that he liked pie too, but by the time the message got back to that first person, the message was something like "Olive in the rye" or some crazy thing that sounds similar but is way off track. It's funny for a school game, but when it comes to preserving history, perhaps not so much. Fights can get started over one word getting misinterpreted between foreign language interpreters. Maybe some guy in history who is known to be a hero today was really a d-bag that got glorified for whatever reason. Maybe he paid someone to say nice things about him. Of course, some oral histories were written down at the time that something was said, but people do mishear (is that a word?), misspeak, and write "typos."

So, oral history isn't reliable, but we wouldn't have the knowledge we do today if it weren't for our ancestors passing down from word-of-mouth how to plow the field, or great-great-great-great-great-great grandpa Joe's heroic fight against the redcoats and stuff like that. People say that we can learn from our mistakes, but I prefer the saying "history repeats itself." I'm not a hippie or anything, but if we learn from our mistakes, why are there still wars, why do people still smoke cigarettes when we know about lung cancer, why do people feed their kids fast food everyday when they know about childhood diabetes and bullies at school? On and on this "why" could go on. History tries to teach, but we refuse to learn. 

Chapter 3
I'm taking a journalism class this semester and a required element in every one of our writing assignments is to have a quote from an actual person you interviewed over phone, email, or in-person. In fact, the most recent assignment we had was to do a profile on someone. The professor assured us that we didn't have to seek out someone with a dazzling history, we obviously didn't have time to get an interview with Barack Obama or Johnny Depp. But he told us that we'd be surprised at the trove of interesting tidbits a person has in their life, if you just sit down and listen to them, they'll give you their treasure. It's definitely not easy to interview a person, you have to make them feel comfortable, you have to create an illusion that all it is is a friendly conversation, even though in the back of your mind you're listening out for a good quick quote or some juicy dirt to write up later and publish to the masses. You have to be a snake charmer, a hypnotist, a siren singing a liquid, sweet song, lull them with your lullaby of friendship and understanding and you can get to the dark, creamy center. My professor says that everyone has an epic story, and I agree, because that's what life is. It's frickin' epic, man. If for no other reason, live to tell your tale.....Okay, maybe I am a hippie

I had literally just finished reading a piece by John Dewey an hour before doing this class's reading. I'm taking an aesthetics class, philosophy of art, and we had to read Dewey's "Art as Experience." He talked about how the experiences of the "common people" are key to understanding a piece of artwork. Many of the philosophers we've read so far in Aesthetics class tended to put themselves on a golden pedestal because they apparently had a super brain power to understand and unravel the mystery of Art. But Dewey said that art should rise from real experience and so it's not this unobtainable thing that only an elite few can understand. 

For "Situating Narrative Inquiry" Clandinin talked about how the product comes from understanding experiences. Dewey seemed to be the opposite in that he said experiences result in the product.

Quotes:
Numbers, scientists sometimes assert, are less ambiguous than language, and thus their interpretation is more straightforward.

Plotlines, character, setting, and action (Bal, 1997) provide ways of holdingmeaning together in more complex, relational, and therefore more nuanced ways than flowcharts or number tables.

Multiple views make for closer attention to a wider variety ofhuman experience.

I especially understood the metaphor of the 3-dimensional space after the story of Ming Fang writing her dissertation in Canada. When the author wrote “at the intersection of place and time” and “at the intersection of looking inward and place” it made me think of a complex system of roads that twist and lead in different directions but they all lead to the same location, understanding. It’s not just one straight, easy road to understanding, you might have to stop at an intersection and turn left to look at place before moving on to time or looking inward to get the entirety of a person’s experience before understanding that person. A person is made up of intricate systems of veins, nerves and mind, so it makes sense that understanding his experiences will be just as difficult as the organism himself. I don’t think we can ever fully understand a person but narrative inquiry is a step towards trying to.