The best tools for good ethnography come from the skills and sensibilities you’ve developed as an observer. Russell Bernard edited a really good book on ethnographic methods entitled
Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology which can help you sharpen these capacities before heading to your field site. But there are also a set of more tangible tools that an ethnographer makes use of: things like notebooks, audio-recorders, video-recorders, etc. A simple notebook and pencil, though sufficient, just won’t yield the rich data one can gather at this stage of technological gadgetry.
In 2007, I took a really nice course on interviewing methods from my advisor,
Steve Parish (check out his latest book,
Subjectivity and Suffering in American Culture). For the course we read a number of key books on the topic (including Briggs’s
Learning How to Ask, Mishler’s
Research Interviewing, and Sullivan’s
The Psychiatric Interview) but the real highlight was engaging in a series of interviews ourselves. I chose to interview a friend of mine who was born and raised in Ireland but has lived in the U.S. for the last twenty years. He stands out as an interesting and thoughtful person, a fact well-conveyed by his sculpture and poetry. In order to interview someone and keep all the facts straight, it’s important to take notes. As I came to realize, though, it’s even more important to record the interviews. Obviously, people managed to perform excellent interviews long before audio-recording technologies but I don’t quite understand how they managed it and kept a clear conscience. The ability to review and reflect upon an entire session and then compare those points to other interviewing sessions is tremendously aided by recordings. For my series of interviews, I used an inexpensive digital recorder that my father had given me for Christmas. It was small and handy but not terribly clear. I often had to review the statements again and again to decipher them.
Since my fieldwork with the Tz’utujil was of another scale altogether and since whatever equipment I might invest in would be mainstays for my research in years to come, I decided to splurge when assembling my tool kit of ethnographic equipment. I spoke with a few friends and with one of my advisors, an expert in audio-visual methods named
John Haviland. After researching their recommendations I ultimately sided with Haviland’s suggestion, the expensive but superb
Edirol R-09 for $349. This light recorder is about the size of a pack of cigarettes and makes virtually perfect recordings onto an SD card. One can set the quality of recording to a number of different MP3 and WAV formats. I usually record in a mid-level MP3 format and cannot detect any flaws. Transferring data to a computer is very easy thanks to the SD card. In fact, my laptop, an inexpensive but solid
HP DV6000, has a built-in drive to read such cards. The only problem I’ve run into a couple of times (and since corrected) is using an older rechargeable battery that loses its power after about an hour-and-a-half of recording. I highly recommend taking rechargeable batteries and a small charger to the field, if you have electricity available. Just make sure to use a relatively new battery when making important recordings. Always select an NiMH battery over a Nickel-Cadmium one and be sure that your charger and batteries are compatible. NiMH batteries are rated according to milliampheres. A battery that has a rating of 2000 or higher is what you want; the higher the rating, the longer the charge. Among other advantages, using rechargeables will prevent you from having to dump toxic materials in a place that may not have any means of safely disposing of such items. I was able to pick up a really tiny charger by Digital Concepts with 4 2500 mAh batteries for under $10 at
Wal-Mart!
Per the suggestion of John Haviland, I purchased two video cameras/camcorders. This is important in case one fails and is also useful as a means to have more than one point of view when recording something like a ritual. Professor Haviland recommended having one camcorder fixed and the other one mobile. I chose two Canon camcorders, one High Definition and the other Standard Definition. Though most people recommended I go with a DV tape camcorder I decided to select flash memory camcorders that recorded onto SD cards. Generally speaking, the less moving parts that a device has, the more rugged it tends to be. The mechanical parts are the ones that tend to fail and are especially subject to damage by shock, moisture, etc. An all-digital camcorder, in contrast, has very few such parts and is especially impervious to shock. Most people feel that the visual quality of flash memory camcorders lags behind the DV tape ones. And many feel that using tape provides one with an additional backup medium. But since tapes are usually only one hour long, you may have to stop and replace the cassette once or twice during a ritual. The fire ceremonies that I have been recording usually last about three hours so this would have been quite a hassle. With my flash memory camcorders, I have the opportunity to leave them running without interruption for very long periods, especially by having them plugged in or using an long--life battery pack. And since one needs to transfer the data from a DV tape to a computer anyway (in order to work with it, review it, etc.), it just didn’t make a lot of sense to me to go through the additional step of using DV tape rather than an SD card. With a flash memory camcorder one can transfer directly from the camera by using a USB cable or remove the card and insert it into a built-in or peripheral card reader. The transfer is very quick in contrast to the DV which takes a while. Again, I was given pretty strong signals to select a DV camera but using flash memory camcorders in the field has been faultless for me so far. Additionally, I don’t have to invest in lots of DV cassettes nor do I have to lug them around. My equipment is small, silent (DV camcorders often record their own buzzing motors) and quick to back up/transfer. The data I am gathering is all digital.
For my more expensive camcorder, the high-definition one, I selected the
Canon HF10 which runs about $750. This camcorder has 16GB of built-in memory as well as an SD slot. Using a
16GB SD card I thus have 32 GB of memory, enough to provide 4 hours of the highest quality HD recording or 12 hours on the lowest quality HD setting (still quite good!). With the HF10, you can additionally purchase a long-life battery pack, the
BP-819. The camcorder comes supplied with the
BP-809 battery pack. The
BP-809 allows for about an hour of recording or 2 hours of playback. The long-life
BP-819 provides about 2 hours of recording or 3.5 hours of playback. The quality of this camcorder is superb.
My less expensive camcorder, the standard-definition one, is the
Canon FS100. You can find this camcorder for about $350. The
HF10 is small and handy…the
FS100 is tiny and nearly invisible in the hand. While I’m a bit hesitant to tote my expensive HD camcorder around, I often carry the
FS100 in a case within my backpack and use it for impromptu recording. I consider this my ‘fun’ camcorder. The video quality is clearly less-refined than the
HF10 but I am still quite impressed with it. For all practical purposes this camcorder provides sufficient video quality. The
FS100 has no built-in memory but with a
16GB SD card you have lots of space for recording, nearly 4 hours in the highest quality setting, about 10 hours in the lowest quality setting. The one drawback of this camcorder is that it has an enclosed battery slot and thus no long-life batteries are available. You’re limited to the battery pack that comes with the unit, the
BP-808, which provides about 1.5 hours of recording time or about 4 hours of playback.
I’ve used both of these cameras for a few months now and haven’t had any problems whatsoever. Both of them came with a small remote control which allows you to stop/start recording from across the room. The packaged software has been sufficient for my purposes though Professor Haviland thought it to be really poor compared to the editing programs he uses. With the packaged software I am also able to convert the HD video to SD so that I can play it back on my computer (HD video requires so much memory and processing power that most laptops aren’t up to the job; additionally, with HD you can only burn BluRay DVDs which, of course, require a BluRay DVD player for playback). And with the packaged software I can compress the SD video to whatever quality I want in case I have short videos I need to upload to
my YouTube channel for friends and family (not my ethnographic data, of course).
Whatever equipment you choose, think about how it will stand up to field conditions and how it will hold up to the test of time and fads; are you investing in a format soon to be outdated? Are you going to be happy with this equipment in 3-5 years? Are you buying right as the new model comes out? In general, wait as long as possible to purchase the equipment since the prices for newer technologies goes down dramatically after a few months.
