Comments on: Note to self

By: jangari

jangari — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 03:37:05 +0000

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!

By: bulanjdjan

bulanjdjan — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:26:45 +0000

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!

By: jangari

jangari — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 02:59:23 +0000

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.

By: mark (the ideophone)

mark (the ideophone) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 11:49:03 +0000

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!