Thu 2 Oct 2008
Note to self
Posted by jangari under Culture, Endangered Languages, Fieldwork, Indigenous, Languages, Linguistics, Wagiman
[4] Comments
When collecting field recordings, always, always begin each audio file with a little blurb mentioning the date, the location, who’s present, and what language is being researched. It’ll cost you about 10 seconds of each recording and you’ll sound like a bit of a tool repeating yourself, but you’ll save yourself hours of work years later when you (finally) get around to archiving your recordings and you need to find all this information from other sources, like airline booking confirmation emails.
Oh, and transcribe your recordings while they’re fresh in your head, lest you find yourself devoting countless hours of unpaid work to do so when you have a brazillion1 other things to do.
- I’m alluding to a George W. Bush joke here:
One of the president’s advisers rushes into the oval office and tells the president that there’s been a terrorist attack in Rio and that 2 Brazilians have been killed.
“Oh my God!” Screams the president, to the astonishment of the advisor, who didn’t think the death of a mere 2 people would have fazed the president so much. “How many are in a brazillion?”
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:49 pm
So true.
Note that for most of todays’ Flash recorders, you can leave the date and time out of your announcement since that will be recorded automagically with the file.1 The first thing I do when I download the audio files to my computer is to use a batch renamer to change the filenames into something meaningful (usually the date, a keyword, and a counter, e.g. 20081002_Dirges_01).
1 Don’t say ‘but that date might change if I change the file’, for you shouldn’t change your originals — always work with a copy!
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:59 pm
I thought I could have used the creation date too, Mark, but I lately found out that the ‘creation date’ is an entirely fictional concept and that only modification date exists as a useful property.
Also, I’ve changed machines since my fieldwork and all my files are sitting on the University server with the same date; the date that I created those copies with. The originals don’t exist anymore; they were first saved onto the hard drive of a machine that is now in pieces and waiting to become my newest toy: an arcade game cocktail table.
October 16th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Total fool, but a golden fool! Even better: get your recording participants to do it for you, then you’ll get a commentary on all sorts of things, like: the weather, who’s in a bad mood etc!
I have a habit of always getting the year wrong (I seem to be perpetually stuck in 2004 – wtf??!), so it causes a bit of a laugh, shows that it’s ok to ‘make mistakes’ or ‘behave normally’ during the recording, and generally breaks the ice re: nerves about being recorded. Especially important to break the ice because making the ‘Today is the 16th of October 2004 (!) at place X with A, B, and C talking language M’ statement can seem like a very formal and intimidating ritual.
Funny thing about this ritual is that speakers I work with regularly come to expect it, such that they now tell other researchers using audio recorders (but not linguists) to ‘do it properly, like bulanjdjan’!! It warms my heart!
October 18th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
I’ve sorted myself out now. I found an old external hard drive (from back in the days when 40GB cost over $200!) that was my first backup out in the field, and it has retained the correct creation dates for all files.
Success!