Methodological Appendices

Methodological Appendices Appendix A: data collection and analysis strategies and reflections This appendix contains more detailed information about the methodological approach adopted in this study and the strategies for collecting and analysing the empirical data. It consists of three parts: (1) an account of the fieldwork and data drawn upon, (2) the interview schedule, and (3) the coding scheme for commemorative posters and speeches. The appendix also presents some reflections on the carrying out of my research. The key question guiding this book is the extent to which the memory of Bloody Sunday has undergone change over time and the context and social forces shaping this memory “career”. To help answer this question I employed a methodological design involving the collection of archival, interview, participant observation and visual data. Different chapters employ different kinds of data. Chapter 2 mainly draws on secondary sources to present an account of Bloody Sunday’s historical context. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 all employ archival data alongside interview data and chapters three, four and six involve the use of participant observation data supplemented by interviews. The data for this book was collected over a six-month period of fieldwork in Derry in the summer of 2004 and was supplemented by data collected during return visits to Derry for the Bloody Sunday commemoration from 2004 to 2009. During the fieldwork stage in 2004 I chose to live in the Bogside because I felt that this would help me to learn more about the immediate physical environment in which Bloody Sunday took place. When people asked me what I was doing I told them that I was a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame and that I was doing research on Bloody Sunday. I turn first to the collection of the archival data. A wide range of archival material was analysed in this study, includ- ing pamphlets, posters, brochures, film footage, letters of correspondence, minute books, press releases, and newspaper articles. Initially, I identified archives with potential relevance to my research through the Directory of Irish Archives and via informal conversations with other researchers.1 As a result of this I visited five archival repositories: the 161 162 Methodological Appendices Northern Ireland Political Collection at the Linenhall Library, Belfast, the Ulster Television archive in Belfast, the Radio Teilifis Éireann (RTÉ) Archives, Donnybrook, Dublin, the archives of Derry City Council, and the National Library of Ireland, Dublin. In the Linenhall Northern Ireland Political Collection I examined the Bloody Sunday boxes, Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association boxes, Civil Liberties Organizations boxes, Civil Rights Organizations boxes, Murals box, Provisional Sinn Féin boxes, Northern Ireland Office Cuttings Files (Londonderry Civil Rights March 30.1.1972, Civil Rights Association, Bogside and Creggan, Londonderry, Londonderry Development Commission, People’s Democracy boxes. In the RTÉ and Ulster Television archive I examined film footage – mostly from news bulletins – of Bloody Sunday commemoration marches. After contacting the RTÉ archivist identifying the material I needed, it was posted to my address. By contrast, I conducted my archival research in the UTV archive in person. I also carried out documentary research in the Central Library, Derry, where I examined the library’s newspaper clippings collection on the following topics: Bloody Sunday clippings and other relevant material, Murals, Bogside, Bogside Artists, Artists, Bogside, Gasyard, Brandywell, Bogside Community Association News file, Creggan News file and Creggan Magazines (General) file. I also examined the library’s micro- film archive of the Derry Journal and Londonderry Sentinel newspapers for media coverage of Bloody Sunday commemorative activity from 1972 to 2009. Additional newspaper research was carried out in the Belfast Central Newspaper Library. In Derry City Council’s Harbour Museum archive I examined the Bridget Bond collection, the minute books of the Londonderry Development Commission 1972–3, and letters of correspondence of the Londonderry Development Commission 1972–3. In addition to this, I examined commemorative posters, brochures and other ephemera held in the Museum of Free Derry, then located at the Gasworks, Bogside, Derry. I also carried out research in the National Library of Ireland, Dublin, where I examined its micro- film archive of the Evening Press, Sunday Business Post, and Irish Daily Star newspapers. For secondary sources on Bloody Sunday I visited the libraries of the Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Ulster (Magee and Coleraine). Following Hill’s observation that ‘researchers continually reshape their understanding of the past as they fit, sort, shift, and reinterpret more and more data into evolving sociohistorical frameworks – guided by theory and creative sparks of insight’,2 I approached the archive Methodological Appendices 163 in an iterative way. By this is meant that as I visited each archive on a number of different occasions I attempted to make sense of earlier examinations of the material in the light of new finds or new data. I also thought of the archival and interview data collection not as mutually exclusive but as processes that guided each other. I used the interviews as an ‘auxiliary method’,3 in conjunction with the archival data collection in that new data that emerged through one guided the collection of data through the other. For example, early on in my fieldwork key informants made reference to commemorative activity such as the Guildhall stained-glass window that I did not know about from my earlier archival work and this led me to follow up debates around this in my later archival visits. By ‘triangulating’ the data in this way, new and unanticipated questions, angles, complexities and insights continually emerged in the back-and-forth dialogue between the interviews and the archival work. My archival searches were not always as productive as I expected. At times I spent many hours working my way through archival boxes and folders with a disappointingly meagre yield in terms of material relevant to my research focus. At other times, though, my first encoun- ter of the day with archival material – often in a box of unsorted documents – turned out to be crucially important. The chance dis- covery in the Linenhall library of typed letters of correspondence between NICRA and the Londonderry Development Commission, for example, about the planning for the Rossville Street memorial rep- 4 resented a kind of archival “epiphany”. I was fortunate to be able to photocopy these archival finds in the Linenhall library and then bring them home with me to read in the comfort of my rented student housing. The availability of photocopying facilities also allowed me to make quick progress through the archival material though sometimes I found myself rushing through it so eager was I for more new discoveries. I also found that the socially constructed categories of the archive were sometimes more disabling than enabling of my research endeav- ours. For example, very few of the items listed in the Linenhall’s “find- 5 ing aid” mentioned Bloody Sunday and my initial visit to the archive suggested – on the face of it anyhow – that few subsequent visits would be needed. Experienced archival researchers would know differently. Initially I constructed a list of people and organizations – Bridget Bond, NICRA, Bogside Community Association, for example – and this helped me to think about what boxes might contain relevant information about Bloody Sunday even if they were not categorized as “Bloody 164 Methodological Appendices Sunday” boxes. This task of getting behind the archive’s categorizations represented a challenging and at the same time pleasant experience and led to several archival “epiphanies”. It also brought into focus the ideological agendas embodied in archives and that they are not neces- sarily neutral repositories of the past. As Sturken observes ‘the archive determines what will speak for history’,6 and what gets preserved and what does not. After several months of visiting the archives I then set about the difficult task of making sense of it and putting it together – and integrating it with the interview data – to tell an interesting story about remembrance and commemoration. The archival data analysis process involved the organization of the material in a temporal and topical way.7 I organized the archival material by topic – such as the march, the Guildhall stained-glass window, the murals, the memorial and so on, and with respect to the march which was the main focus of the present paper, I organized the material temporally, that is by decade. I also constructed a spatiotemporal chronology of Bloody Sunday commemorative events to help me get a better sense of the spatial and temporal distribution of commemorative activity over more than thirty years (see appendix). My analysis of commemorative speeches and posters was guided by the coding scheme set forth in appendix C. Archival data document what happened in relation to the past but it is not as well positioned to tell us about how people felt about the past. Asking questions of people helps to fill this gap. Interview data for this study comes from thirty-one in-depth, semi-structured interviews carried out with members of the victims’ families, memory choreographers, former civil rights activists, participants in Bloody Sunday commemorative events, and community leaders over a six-month period of fieldwork in Derry in 2004. Further interviews took place at the 2005 and 2008 commemoration. Interview questions included questions about respondents’ background, involvement in Bloody Sunday commemora- tions, and attitudes and opinions about various sites of Bloody Sunday memory. All the interviews were conducted by me and in person. Interviewees were identified through the archival research and through snowball sampling. In general, I found the interviewees to be very comfortable answering questions about Bloody Sunday.

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