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Ditch the Notebook: Ethnographers’ Digital Toolkit

Posted on 03 Apr 2011

Lets face it, most ethnographic methods are old and make poor use of technology. In my research, I spent way too much time 1) writing down field notes, 2) transcribing interviews, and 3) coding for analysis. It was unproductive and energy-intensive work that could be put to better use. As a result, I developed methods that did away with all of that. No more writing of field notes, no more long hours of transcribing interviews and no more senseless coding. The end product however, is still the same: coded interviews, photos, videos and field notes in a secure database accessible from anywhere. I’ve documented my particular approach here for others to re-use, modify or ignore to their liking.

While there are countless tools and methods available to the budding ethnographer, some more effective than others, doubtless everyone will have their own style, tools and processes that they think are the best. While I don’t claim to have the end-all tools that will change everyone’s mind about collecting field data, there are some clear advantages to the tools and methods that I lay out here. Before documenting my specific methods of ethnographic approach, I should mention a few of my own biases regarding ethnography.

1. I hold no purist assumptions about 19th century conceptions of objectivity or authenticity about distancing myself from my research subjects. To research is to affect and be affected by your subjects and without doing so you risk oversimplifying or missing large parts of your subjects’ reality.
2. The ethnographer’s ‘eye’ is not better or worse than other technological tools, simply one of many tools of the trade.
3. Covert research is a matter of choice, not universally prohibited. Don’t try to get a release form from KKK members to please your IRB.

In-the-Field Tools

For every research project, there are four must-have items that I bring with me to every research site. They are:

1. Local SIM Card
2. Smartphone
3. Local Currency
4. Wide Variety of Clothes

Experienced ethnographers will notice two things: 1) this is a very short list and 2) that I have left off the infamous pen and paper. This omission is of course up to the preference of the individual researcher–many of which will disagree with me–but as I will discuss later, I strongly advise that ethnographers break this habit. Unless you have nostalgia for the smell and texture of ink and paper, leave it at home.

Local SIM Card Having local cellphone access in your research site is essential, even if you happen to be studying people without telephones. Maintaining contact with your research group or university as well as other people back home is a quality that most researchers should keep up. Things change quickly when you are in the field and it’s important to maintain ties back to your home. Accordingly, when you get to your research site, if not in your home country you can go to your local convenience store and buy a pre-paid SIM card. These little cards are in most smartphones, and with a little software hack, are interchangeable based on the country you are in. Google ‘unlock {your phone type}’ and you’l be able to figure out how to do it. You should first, of course, make sure the phone you buy is unlockable before going to another country. Most common smartphones, Droid and iPhones included, are capable of this. If you can get internet in the country of research, you should. Most prepaid SIM cards include a ‘data’ option that you can purchase. It will come in handy for backing up your ethnographic data.

Smartphone One of the most important tools that any contemporary ethnographer can have is a smartphone. Whether it’s a Blackberry, iPhone or Droid, its versatility, power and ubiquity will solve many of the problems that ethnographers face in the field. For my research, I use an iPhone, however the same will apply for other smartphones on the market. Having access to the internet, where accessible is invaluable. Once you have a smartphone up and running at your research site there are a number of features that I have found invaluable.

GPS Navigation This seemingly innocuous feature of most smartphones is incredibly useful to the researcher in the analysis stage of ethnographic research. There are three features of the iPhone GPS that I have come to depend on.

1. Google Maps for directions on where to go and what is nearby.
2. Geotagging of all pictures and videos taken in the field.
3. Automatic geo-tracking of where you have been at what times of the day/night.

On the iPhone, by default the photos and videos will have geotags embedded in them. For geotracking, there are a number of apps available in the apple store. I use both MotionX GPS and Firepin when I am looking for real time recordings of where I am traveling. For the most part however, I simply connect the dots from photos and video tags taken from my phone (more on this in the analysis section). This, of course leads me to:

Photos and Videos Carrying a physical camera or videocamera is both conspicuous and at times obtrusive. In most areas of the western world, carrying a cell phone and snapping photos is so commonplace as to not set off any person’s guard. When you want to effectively signal that you are a ‘researcher’ or ‘photographer’ then you should carry a camera, but for most ethnographers it is much more helpful not to have subject’s guards up. At this point, the quality of photos and videos from smartphones rivals many traditional SLR cameras and video recorders. For the most part there’s no loss of quality in image, unless you’re trying to make a hollywood film.

The Phone Having an actual mobile phone with a local number will go a long way in keeping you in touch with your research subjects. They will be much more likely to call you, if needed, and you can more easily stay in touch with them to arrange meet-ups. This should go without saying, but remember to bring your phone charger; otherwise, you’ll quickly learn how difficult it can be trying to charge the thing using other people’s hospitality.

Voice Recorder This feature is one of the key tools that should be used constantly by any ethnographer in the field. There are a number of applications available on the iPhone specifically designed for field recording. I use FiRe 2. Hindernburg Field Recorder is also good but more expensive. Do NOT use the default iPhone voice recording app. The memory limit on the app is small and buggy. I’ve only managed to get 3-4 hours of recording at a time with it. Not worth the pain in realizing that your recorder didn’t capture a 4 hour long interview (trust me).

One of the main reasons that I no longer bring pen and paper with me in the field is the ability to record everything and have it automatically transcribed–yes transcribed. Whenever I enter the field either from my hotel room, hostel, bunk, etc., I flip the recording switch on for the day and leave it running until I come home. When possible I try to leave it outside of my pants’ pockets and closer to speaking level. Shirt pockets or suit breast pockets are great for this. The iPhone picks up everything and it is easy to hear the recording. If I am interviewing someone directly, often I will take the phone and leave it on the table for crisper sound. As I’ll discuss later, when I am back from the day I will archive the file and upload it to a transcriber to get a printout of the day’s conversation.

As any good ethnographer knows, transcriptions of what happened are only part and parcel of the total experience in the field. You should be paying attention to sights, sounds, touch, smell and even taste if necessary. Instead of writing observations down in field notes, I encourage people to try to get in the habit of speaking them so they are picked up by your recorder. While it may take some time to get used to talking to yourself, it saves time and effort to describe your thoughts on the fly rather than waiting for a time to write and reflect. When you are not in a position to speak your thoughts, I use a trick of ‘auditory marking’ of the recording so that you can come back to it later. There are a number of ways that you can do this. My favorite is the ‘bump’. If you bump your recorder hard enough, there will be an audio peak that visually sticks out when you look at the waveform on your computer. A glass ‘clink’ at a dinner table or other situationally appropriate noises also work great (as long as you can remember what they are). When you can speak freely you can talk about your observations and then insert those observations into their appropriate place on your computer’s audio waveform timeline. If you absolutely must write something down, be honest and let your subject know that you ‘really want to write that down’. They may even have pen and paper on them or nearby. When you do so, you respect the situation and environment without imposing your research needs on the conversation.

Calendar There are a number of reasons why you should be using a calendaring system in your day-to-day life, but for field research there are specific reasons that make it essential. One of the most useful features of calendaring apps on smartphones I’ve found has been the ‘alarms’ function. Alarms allow you to enter and exit situations based on where you need to or would rather not be. In most of the West, cell phone interruptions, while often rude, are commonplace and ubiquitous enough to allow researchers control of the situation. Often entitling them to leave a conversation, change the subject matter or probe a subject for more information, cell phone alarms can give the researcher an opportunity to redefine the ground rules of a conversation.

In addition to this social feature of cell phone alarms, you also tend not to be late for your appointments. People are much more open to talk when not annoyed by your tardiness.

Games Aside from being able to amuse yourself on long flights, there is a clear advantage to having games available if you are near children. If you are talking to a family, often times giving a child a game to play with on the phone can free up the parent’s concentration to answer some of your questions. Or, if you are trying to solicit information from the child, it’s a great way to put him or her at ease while you prepare some questions or conversation points. In that respect, it’s also a great way to make a friend or two.

Those are some of the main features of the smartphone that are essential to my work as an ethnographer. There are thousands of applications available on Droid, iPhone and Blackberry that suit a myriad of other purposes, but for the purpose of collecting data I’ve found these features the be the most constructive for research.

Local Currency Whether we want to admit it or not, money talks. Obviously, one should adhere to the local customs regarding the proper use of money in every situation, but spending money can gain you access to areas of life that may otherwise be closed off to you. Generosity in time and money goes a long way, so remember to bring cash to gain access to people and places that you may be unfamiliar with.

Wide Variety of Clothes Often when I enter the field I have no idea what situations I may find myself in. Because of that uncertainty, I always bring a change of clothes to fit nearly every scenario. If your subjects insist on going to an upscale nightclub or to the beach, you should make sure that you are prepared to go with them and not kicked to the curb for your Tweed.

Data Archiving Tools

Having covered my digital field tools, there are a number of analysis tools that make much of the research methodology above more feasible in the long run.

Backing Up Data When not in the field, it’s important that I capture and back up all the day’s data either on a portable laptop when possible, or remote server when not. The thought of losing all my work because of a stolen or lost phone is enough to make me do it every evening. As I use an iPhone for my primary instrument, I backup every recording I make to iTunes utilizing the iOS File Sharing Feature of the FiRe2 app and iTunes. Additionally I backup the photos and videos into iPhoto automatically and sort them into the digital library within the program. If for instance I am out in the field at the end of the day and do not plan on returning to my computer for backups, I make sure that I do a remote backup to either SoundCloud or Dropbox via the FiRe2 app. This is fairly easy to do providing that you have internet access. The backup runs in the background and is fairly fast in the U.S. and Europe. Depending on the country and remoteness of the region, this can take a few hours to backup a day’s recording, so it’s best to do it before you go to bed to be safe.

If you use any other type of phone the same procedure should work using the phone’s recording software available in their application stores.

Getting Transcriptions At the end of every backup at night I send the audio files out to be transcribed. To be processed, a machine has to encode them in real-time then process them. So if you have 5+ hours of recordings, it won’t be done for 10+ hours. I do it this way, so that when I wake up in the morning, I can review yesterday’s activity and decide on the best course of action. It’s a bit like getting motion picture film dailies as a director. You review yesterday’s takes, see what worked and what didn’t and decide what you need to shoot for the next day.

There are a number of transcription services out there, some good, most bad. In the end, you get what you pay for. If you want free, you’re transcription of ‘I want a good meal’ will end up like ‘savant root peel’. I use Voicebase which is one of the cheapest and best available that I’ve found. They charge $1 for every hour of audio you send them. So for your fieldwork of 7 hours a day, it’s $49 for the whole week. This processing is done by a machine, but it does a decent job at figuring out the words. Of course, you’ll want to go back and put some fine editing on that text later, but just like film dailies, out in the field you’re there to look at coverage, not granularity.

Coding and Archiving While you could invest in an expensive ‘qualitative software research package’ like NVIVO or Atlas.ti, there are countless other programs that have similar functionality without the ‘qualitative research’ name, and therefore, price. My absolute favorite is a combination of Evernote and Tag Maven. Evernote is a free software program that takes any of your media files from your computer or smartphone and stores them in a database both on your computer and a remote server accessible from anywhere. I will go through my procedures for using these programs in steps.

First, Evernote has both desktop and mobile applications. I have set up the iPhone application which takes all my media and imports them into the database with date, time, and geolocation stamps. Additionally, if I am away from an internet connection, I can sync them to my computer through iTunes and iPhoto to be imported later.

Next, I set up Tag Maven. This utility is an add-on to Evernote which automatically tags all my documents utilizing the OpenCalais service. I’ve written about this service in other posts here. It does an excellent job at pulling the major themes, people and topics from your data. You can then add or delete tags from there according to your needs. The junior version of this program costs $2.99, and the full version $19.99. I strongly recommend buying the full version. The junior version requires that you open the application and manually sync each time you import or change any of the notes in Evernote, while the full version automatically tags at specified time increments any changes you make to your notes.

After you have the system up and running you can start adding all your data to evernote. You can then copy your transcribed data from your iphone recordings into a new note and Evernote will automatically tag your field notes for the day. You can drag your photos onto notes or insert them directly from your smartphone Evernote application. Video, I believe has to be imported from your computer.

So, with all that, you should have all your data (interview transcripts, photos, videos, field notes) imported into Evernote with automatic codes and markup that can be accessed from anywhere over the internet. With all this you’ve saved time and stress and can devote your efforts to analysis rather than administrative litany.