Research in the field

I just got back from Paraguay and now I’m confronted with a huge hunk of research. That research takes many forms and I’m staring down the barrel of a lot of data. So I thought I’d make this post about my field research strategies, including some of my successes and missteps. (Next post I’ll put up the pitches and correspondence that led to this assignment, I promise!)

I’ve written before about the way I use technology (particularly when interviewing people in Spanish). I thought I’d start by going over my field kit and explaining how I used everything on my recent trip to Paraguay.

The kit:

Olympus LS-10 digital recorder

Olympus DS-40 digital recorder

Lumix GH-1 camera

Nokia n86 smart phone

Kodak zi8 handheld camcorder

HP mini netbook

Panasonic RP-HX70 folding headphones

WD portable external hard drive (not pictured)

3×5 Notecards and rubber bands

Uniball Signo 207 pens (my pen preference changes frequently and occupies an inordinate amount of mental bandwidth)

Tenba Mini Photo/Laptop Bag

Websites/software: Notepad, Skype, SpanishDict.com

Let’s start with the digital recorders. The LS-10 is an amazing recorder. Palm-sized, with two mickey-mouse ears for mics, it captures broadcast quality sound. Do I need broadcast quality sound? Absolutely not. In reality this device is overkill for me. That said, I love it. It’s made of tough aluminum and feels solid as a brick. It picks up every sound in a room but somehow cuts through annoying background dissonance (construction noise, fridge condensers, chatter). It also has high and low cut filters, adjustable sensitivity, and a number of record modes that range from uncompressed .WAV files to space-conscious mp3s. It’s got SDHC removable storage, too, which is absolutely life saving if you have lots of interviews and no chance to transfer files off the device.

When I show up for a scheduled interview, I usually make some small talk, thank the source for their time, and then ask if there’s somewhere quiet we can sit. I’ve found that it’s important when interviewing people to have a distinct start to the interview. In other words, if you show up and your subject starts giving you information before you’re through the door, it pays to slow them down, get control of the exchange, and ask if you can settle in somewhere cozy. The obvious reason for this is that if you’re recording your interviews (I record all of mine) you don’t want to miss anything. But there are other reasons. The information you get from a source is shaped by any number of factors. Sometimes a source is so eager to start talking (because of nerves, excitement, etc.) they’ll ramble on in a million directions that aren’t always easy to track or particularly useful. If, however, you sit down, take some time to explain what kind of article you’re working on, and go over (very generally) what kinds of things you’re interested in hearing about, you’re going to have a much more directed, useful interview. You also get to choose the first question that way.

This isn’t to say, of course, that you should artificially constrain your interview. It’s good to be surprised by a source and if you know everything ahead of time, what’s the point of the interview? But it definitely pays to be in a position of control. Sources often relax when they feel like they have some guidance. I’ve learned after a lot of trial and error to take my time when I start an interview, give my interviewee some early direction, and to not be afraid to ask a source to slow down, back up, or go over something in more detail (especially when it comes to describing scenes which I may later want to recreate). Just being in that mindset, I think, helps me conduct better, more responsive interviews.

You maybe noticed that there are two audio recorders in my kit. Yeah, there are very few times when I’ve needed two. But, as chance would have it, I actually ended up needing both on my trip to Paraguay. The reason? User error. The DS-40 is my older recorder. It’s smaller and dead simple to use. I tagged along with an organization called Un Techo Para Mi Pais (A Roof  For My Country) my first day in Paraguay. The organization helps build houses for impoverished families. They took me to see some of their work in a very hard up neighborhood on the outskirts of Asuncion. Since the DS-40 fits better in my pocket, that’s what I started with. I recorded a ton of audio: a long conversation in the car ride over, the trek through the neighborhood, conversations with several families we met along the way, interviews with two directors of the organization. I ended up with about three-and-a-half hours worth of audio. I could have cut that down. It’s not an efficient way to do things, but I didn’t want to miss anything and my brain doesn’t work fast enough to write shorthand notes in English while listening to 100 MPH Paraguayan Spanish. (More on transcribing in a second.)

Ordinarily this wouldn’t have been a problem. On its lowest quality setting, this little recorder can do something like 16 hours. Unfortunately, I forgot to put it on its lowest quality setting. About halfway through the day, the recorder stopped. All full. Again, this was a stupid and avoidable user error. But user errors are a reality of life (a bigger reality than I’d care to admit) and I’m glad I built in some redundancy. With another recorder in my bag, I was good to go.

So what am I doing with all this audio? First I transfer the files to my portable hard drive. And then comes the dirty part. All that audio has to be converted into text. While I dream of efficient audio-to-text programs (in, er, Spanish), I haven’t found anything yet. Transcribing has to be the biggest pain in the ass of the research process. An hour of audio in Spanish takes me at least two hours to transcribe. I often need multiple listens and inevitably I need to look things up (this, incidentally, is where spanishdict.com comes in handy — an online Spanish-English dictionary and translator).

My transcribing setup is pretty straightforward. I unfold my travel headphones (hotel rooms and airports were consistently my transcribing bases during this trip), plug them into the recorder (both the LS-10 and DS-40 have great playback interfaces, which is important when you consider how many times you have to press pause, fast forward, and rewind during transcription), and sit with my little HP mini netbook to clack away. I use Notepad for transcription and not Microsoft Word. This is simply because I don’t want to be distracted by formatting considerations, spell check, etc. I know you can turn it all off, but Word is what I write on and it’s hard to not play the perfectionist with a crisp print-view word doc open. This stage is just about getting the words on the page. It’s easy enough to go in later and clean everything up. (One tip I culled from an online freelancer’s forum: go through all your transcripts and bold text that seems relevant, important quotes, facts, etc. This makes it much easier to utilize transcripts down the road.)

Of course audio is just one component of research. I use my camera quite a bit, as well. I’ve got a decent camera that’s more than capable of capturing publishable photographs (this was a consideration during this story, since there’s no way Ode Magazine is going to send a photographer back to Paraguay). I take pictures of all my interview subjects, both for publication and also so I can nail descriptions of people and of the places where we met. A photograph is an excellent tool for jogging the memory and allows me pin down descriptive details with confidence.

With this in mind, I also use my Nokia n86 pretty extensively. First, it’s always in my pocket. If I’m ever without my field kit, I still have pretty complete functionality. I can record audio, take video, snap decent quality pictures, etc. I tend to snap atmosphere photos with my phone — the shots that simply serve as visual notes to capture a scene, weather, landscapes, small details. I dump all these images onto the portable hard drive. I refer to them constantly while I’m writing and some of my best descriptions come straight from photos. I’ve done spur-of-the-moment interviews with the phone (most excitingly with a former paramilitary member in the middle of a Colombian jungle during a five-day trek). And it takes decent video, which, again, helps with atmosphere.

All this said, the pen and note cards are probably the only pieces of indispensable kit in my bag. This trip I used a stack of 3x5s held together with a rubber band. In the past I’ve used steno pads, small legal pads, Moleskines, softcover saddle stitched notebooks, and a bunch of other varieties, shapes, and sizes. I can’t say I really have a preference (except maybe a preference for variety). the nice thing about the note cards is that I can rearrange them, which is helpful if I come back to a subject later in my research and need to add information. I can also write directions and phone numbers, remove a single card, and stick it in my front pocket where it’ll be easily accessible. Important when negotiating taxis in a foreign country.

Basically I always have my note cards and pen at hand. I make sure to have every source write out their own full name (which I actually had to rethink this trip, as some of my sources couldn’t write). I gather contact information on the cards and have them at the ready to jot down an observation, an idea that might be relevant to the story, my daily research schedule, to-do lists, etc. They’re a mess and a jumble by the end of the day, but they’re chock full of important info. I group the note cards in whatever order seems logical and have them available for reference while I’m writing the article. Nothing fancy here.

That’s about it for my collection strategy. My organizational strategy is ever-evolving, but for this assignment I find myself arranging all my research into a single document called “Research by Topic.” Basically, I pick topics or events that I think will make their way into the article. So, for instance, the biography of the main subject of my piece, a guy named Padre Pedro Velasco, will become a topic written in bold. Underneath the bolded words Velasco Bio I cut and paste everything pertaining to Pedro Velasco I have. That means excerpts from transcripts, news articles, pictures, notes. I make sure to write the origin of all this information, which is something I’ve forgotten to do in the past. It’s a huge frustrating pain to have to re-find the source of a golden nugget of information. With this done, I’ve got a nice little file, a way to reference Pedro Velasco’s bio without wading a second or third time through every bit of research I’ve done. Once I’ve got a number of topics in this document and have gone through all my research, I’m ready to start my article. Inevitably I’ll fill in more topics, reduce or combine topics, and discard others altogether. This is just one helpful step toward organizing my research.

So that’s it. That’s my general research strategy for this trip. There is one more thing I wanted to mention about my research kit, though. It’s functional and I use it constantly, but it has another important purpose. It gets me excited about going into the field. I love gadgets and I love the image of the field reporter. It’s silly and maybe a little embarrassing, but something like a bag that perfectly holds all my things gets me incredibly excited — in no small part because I start to imagine myself interviewing someone on some dusty road somewhere, the bag slung functionally over my shoulder. I have tons of bags. My wife makes fun of me for it. And it is funny. But hell, it’s part of what gets me excited to be a writer. Same with the audio recorders, the phone, the cameras. There’s value in that. Why fight it?

With that in mind, allow me to introduce my newest addition. I bought it in a little shop in Paraguay for $40. It’s new, but it had obviously been sitting there for some time. The leather was dry and brittle. I got it home and started treating it, working it in, super-gluing loose threads. Now it’s soft and deeper-hued and feels perfectly sturdy. I stuck a photo divider insert inside — a perfect fit. And you know what? I can’t wait to be on some dusty road with it, gadgets tucked snugly inside.