Meet at the coffee shop near Hamid the baker’s at 5 p.m. Thursday 12th. Mrs. Carranza worked in a butcher’s shop in the 1950s in Brooklyn. Remember to ask her about work conditions, pay, hours, etc.
With either notebook or smartphone you will have your own shorthand for being able to take notes speedily, and you may develop more tricks as you progress with these projects. For now the task is to find the most convenient way to jot notes as you go.
Voice Recorder
Apart from your notebook, a voice recorder is your most valuable fieldwork tool, so choose one with care. Digital voice recorders come in all price ranges from around $30 to well over $1,000. The fact that modern recorders are small and can record long sessions without checking on them is a great blessing. You do, however, need to pay attention to a number of features when considering which recorder to buy – and you should buy your own. Other equipment you can borrow if necessary, but you need to own a voice recorder.
Of critical importance in choosing a recorder is its range and clarity of recording. Recorders come with built-in microphones of varying quality. Very expensive models can record music in stereo with extraordinary precision. This is overkill for regular fieldwork. For a typical interview you need a recorder that you can place on a table between you and your interviewee, and it will pick up all that both of you say – clearly. Do not buy a recorder online. Go to a store and test out their products. Sit in a simulated interview situation with the salesperson and test out the floor models. Make sure that when you play back the recording, you can hear the voices plainly, and they are not unduly muddied by ambient noise in the environment.
You will find that a number of recorders pick up voices adequately, so then you must turn your attention to other features. You need a recorder that will allow you to keep interviews separate in labeled files, and you must be able to pinpoint precise moments in each interview via a counter or timer. It is important to have all of your field data properly filed and indexed, so that when you are writing notes or a paper, you can jump immediately to that spot in an interview where, say, Arjun talked about fracturing his pelvis in a skiing accident. It’s not good enough to know that he talked about it at some point in an interview last Thursday. Good indexing is vital, which means that your recorder must facilitate this process without complications. More details on indexing and filing are laid out in the relevant projects.
Some recorders use replaceable batteries, some rechargeable. If it has a rechargeable battery, buy a spare, and keep it charged. If it uses replaceable batteries, keep spares with you at all times. Batteries have a bad habit of dying at inconvenient moments. Also make sure that data on the recorder is easily transferable to other media. Ideally it should have a memory card that allows you to make backup copies of interviews on your laptop or other device. Backup copies are essential. Never rely on a single copy. You may also consider backing up your data on a cloud storage service.
Camera
For routine field photography, you can use the camera in your smartphone provided that it is up to the task. Many of the latest models can take excellent photos, but they can be memory and battery hogs. Make sure that whenever you set out to complete a project you have space in memory for the number of photos you are likely to take, and that you have some device with you for a quick recharge if the need arises. Otherwise, you may decide that for field photography a dedicated camera is your best option.
This point leads me to an important issue about fieldwork photography in general, namely, that your purpose is not to take photos that are aesthetically pleasing, although it does not hurt if they are. First and foremost, you are recording data. A photo for fieldwork needs to record relevant information, but it does not have to be composed artistically. You do have to be concerned with not getting too close or too far away from your subject matter, but it does not matter if there are extraneous details in your shot. There is more on this subject in relevant projects.
Cameras come in all price ranges with all manner of attachments. How much you want to spend will be determined by your abilities with a camera (and your wallet). A DSLR camera is the optimum choice because the viewfinder (or monitor) shows you exactly what the lens is seeing, and, therefore, the image that you frame will be the image that is captured. For fieldwork, a camera with point-and-shoot ability is ideal, that is, a camera that automatically adjusts focus, shutter speed, and aperture size, so that all you have to worry about is what to point at. Even with plenty of experience operating a camera manually it is best not to have to concern yourself with changing settings when you are recording data. The less attention you have to give to your equipment when conducting fieldwork, the better. Having decent zoom capacity for close-ups is useful, as is having the ability to capture wide-angle shots. Currently I use an 18/400 lens, which covers most bases and is not desperately unwieldy (although it is noticeable). In the past I used an 18/55 lens, which was perfectly adequate for documentation most of the time and did not take up much space. Expense may be your critical criterion here.
Most digital cameras nowadays can also take video, but they are limited in this respect. The built-in microphones are usually of poor quality, and video gobbles up memory and battery. They also tend to have time limits on recordings to prevent filling the memory card. If you have ambitions of making field videos of any length, you will need a dedicated video camera with an adequate external microphone.
Computing
A number of projects in this volume are designed to be completed online, or they have an online option. Most of these projects are best completed using a laptop or desktop computer with an ample monitor and a webcam (either built in or external), although many are also designed with a smartphone in mind. For projects that involve heavy visuals, a desktop or laptop is the better option rather than a smartphone. Smartphone cameras are limited and their screens are too small to capture much other than a single person, whereas a laptop or desktop monitor can display a wide field of vision, or multiple people, at the same time. You will also need reliable high-speed internet access – emphasis on reliable. Before you begin any online projects, thoroughly test your internet service to be sure that heavy usage for an hour or more is not likely to result in dropped links or frozen screens. There can be no certainty in this regard, but you need to take all necessary precautions to limit the chances of failure.
Keeping a Journal
If you are doing a number of these projects for some kind of course of study or training, I strongly advise you to keep a personal journal (in the spirit of Malinowski’s Diary). A journal has several functions. The projects themselves have a built-in self-critical component, and this is an important part of each exercise. A journal has a somewhat different purpose, although self-critical analysis needs to be in there. It is crucial to realize that a journal is not a public document; it is your private space for ruminations. It is for your eyes only. You can note down anything in a journal that comes to your mind at the time – including what you had for lunch or if it was raining on the way to an interview. You should not spend much time thinking about what is and is not relevant as a journal entry. It is a written version of your inner monolog, so that anything and everything are relevant.
Reflexivity (pp 20–21) is not a necessary component of many of the projects in this book, but an assessment of your successes and failures each time is essential. Personal ruminations on how well you think you are doing, what things you can do differently, fears you have, and the like are part of the ongoing process of maturing as a fieldworker and should be recorded. The individual entries can serve as a guide concerning your personal motivations, for example, when you are writing up the results of each project, but the journal also has the long-term benefit of being a permanent record of your inner workings as a fieldworker, and can be consulted long after your training has finished.
3 Ethics of Fieldwork
Because fieldwork is the study of people, following ethical principles is especially important. I address specific