The sections on taking field notes and transcribing were both directly relevant to my research at this time, not only for my thesis but for assignments in other courses. For the TA practicum, we had to complete three class observations over the course of the semester. Our reports were not meant to be analytic as much as observational; that said, I took notes on EVERYTHING that went on in those classrooms, from the instructor's overall demeanor to the students' reactions. This process was always sort of tricky for me, however. I'm not usually one to take too many notes in class; I (like to) think I retain information better by simply listening. I feel like I'm missing something if I'm focused on my notebook and my hand is constantly moving. For these observations though, the entire assignment was based on all those details, so I left each class with pages of the most seemingly mundane occurrences. I think part of my struggle related to my restriction to descriptive notes and the omission of reflective notes; I like to sit back and look at what my notes mean, but since we were specifically asked not to analyze during these observations, I just felt like a machine spewing out details (what an image).
The section on transcribing was also directly relevant to my research because I just spent 3-4 hours on a plane transcribing an interview. I enjoyed this quite a bit: "Because many researchers have day jobs and feel both fatigue and uncommon satisfaction after a successful data collection visit, they find timely transcription to be only slightly more probable than winning the lottery" (70). Transcribing, I found, is not fun-- it's not difficult, per se, but incredibly time-consuming. My interview, which I held via Skype and downloaded some recording software to record the conversation, contained about 70 minutes worth of usable information (we veered off topic from time to time and I decided to only keep what was relevant (as discussed on p. 71)); I wound up with about ten and a quarter pages of single-spaced text. Yup. When Dyson and Genishi say that the rewards of transcribing are huge, however, I can see the truth in that statement (minus the carpal tunnel): it is very cool to have pages upon pages of conversation, basically rich data that directly pertains to my research. While some sort of voice-recognition software would have saved me literally hours of work, my immersion in the process allowed me to really reflect on what was said and gave me some leads as to how I could utilize this information.
I agree with you first paragraph very strongly, and have a recent tie to fiction that it reminds me of. We often don't think that details can add up to much, but they can often add up to significant patterns or insights that we might otherwise miss. A lot of the writing of Don Delillio, Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace revolves around this idea, that there's an entire story within the little details, and that zooming in on even the most mundane can be a beautiful and moving experience. DFW in particular does this with an Illinois State Fair, the Maine Lobster Festival, and the Adult Video News awards in Las Vegas.
ReplyDeleteI'm about to have my interview this weekend, so I'm really excited and really nervous (here's the equation N>E, n = nervous and e = excited). Since I'm dealing with language issues, I'm interviewing a person who speaks Spanish, English, and maybe some Portuguese. I speak with her in Spanish for the most part, so I don't know if the interview should be conducted in Spanish or English. If it's in English, then everything is good because it's just the transcribing. If it's in Spanish, I might need to translate large chunks of it if it's related to the research. This would seem easy, but I would also have to double check with her to see if my translation kept her idea in tact. I'm looking forward to it though.
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