Due Tuesday, November 28th in class

In this assignment, you will collect your own data.  You will do this by recording (video or audio) a natural, regular, real-life conversation among two or more people, of which you will be one of the conversational participants.  The conversation can be during a family gathering, a gossip or joke-telling session among friends, a study session with fellow students, or a meeting at a religious or civic organization in which you participate.  It should last at least half an hour, enough time to allow the conversation to flow.

This conversation does not have to be in English, although if it is in another language, you must provide a transcription in whatever language is used as well as a translation into English.

Setting up the conversation
The conversation should take place somewhere that is comfortable for your informants and that allows for a somewhat private conversation to take place, wherever that may be: a living room, a kitchen, a coffee shop. Be aware that some places may be noisier than others: a cafe, a conversation over Thanksgiving dinner, one that is outside, or that has more than three people will have more background noise and be more difficult to transcribe than one between two people in a private room.  You might make some adjustments to the setting in order to get as good a recording as possible: turning off background music or a blaring TV, closing the window, or, if in public, sitting as far away from other people as possible.  However, we are interested in a real-life conversation, so don't make it seem too artificial.

Failure--in the form of an incomprehensible tape--is fine; it will simply mean that you have to try again.

Because we are working with human beings, unexpected things may happen: children may get sick, cars may not start, someone may have to work late. This means that you should plan on recording the conversation as soon as possible, because it may need to be rescheduled.  DO NOT WAIT UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE TO DO THIS ASSIGNMENT!

Ethical considerations
Be upfront with people about who you are. Let them know the reason you are doing this and the purposes for which it will be used. Make sure that they are amenable to your doing this.  Ask people whether they would like to be referred to by their real names or a pseudonymn, or, alternatively, tell them you will guarantee their anonymity (that you will give everyone pseudonymns).  But if you tell them you will give them anonymity, follow through on that promise.  You should also tell them that only your fellow students and the professor will have access to the conversation, and that we promise to keep that material private.

Your informant(s) has done you a favor in giving you an interview. "The informant has decided to help you," notes Bruce Jackson in Fieldwork (1989). How can you reciprocate? Be respectful and attentive. Don't make your objective of tape-recording the conversation take priority over observing and respecting the rules of the particular situation you are participating in.  You might consider what you can give your informant(s) in return, doing whatever seems natural and respectful for the relationship: buy them a cup of coffee or dessert or a drink, give them a copy of the tape or the paper, or whatever seems most appropriate to the situation or relationship. 

Recording
A tape-recorder can be borrowed from the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice from the secretary, Ms. Sherry Pisacano, for 48 hours.  If you borrow it, you will have to sign an agreement saying that you will return the machine in time and in good condition; if this is not done, you will not get a grade for the course until you pay for a replacement tape recorder.  You will have to provide your own tapes and batteries.

Before the time you have agreed to meet with your informants, make sure that the tape recorder is working (record something and play it back).  Bring new batteries and make sure that you have enough tapes.  Make sure you know how to use the equipment and are comfortable around it.  (Your nervousness in using it will make your informants nervous as well.) If you plan to use electric power, make sure that there is an outlet nearby and consider bringing an extension cord just in case.  But often relying on battery power allows you to be more flexible in where you all sit and where the recorder is placed.  The tape recorder should be placed in the middle between all participants, such as in the center of the table.  If the table is a hard surface, you might put something soft underneath (like a napkin or handkerchief) so it is not picking up its own vibrations when the table is accidently jolted.

You should turn on the tape recorder at the beginning of the conversation and not shut it off until the conversation is over, except in the following conditions: someone asks you to turn the tape recorder off momentarily in order to relate something confidential (for your ears alone) or the conversation itself stops momentarily (because someone answers a phone call, etc.).  Otherwise, keep the tape recorder running.  After you have turned the tape recorder on, you should check that it is recording properly and be attuned to when the tape will need to be changed (every 30-45 minutes or so depending on the length of the tape).  But don't make the tape recorder the focus of your attention.  Although the tape recorder may initially make people nervous, you should act naturally around it, looking at people's faces rather than the tape recorder.  Within a few minutes, everyone will forget it is there.

First Run Through
You should plan to make time (about an hour) after you have tape-recorded the conversation to listen to it once quickly and make notes about it.  You should write notes of a few pages about the context (your kitchen at Thanksgiving dinner, a cafe, the time of day, etc) and the people involved, describing them and their relationship to you.  Look at chapter one of Jean Briggs's book Inuit Morality Play for a description of a setting and characters.  You want to describe the setting in detail, perhaps drawing a map showing where people are sitting, and getting a sense of the atmosphere (tense? warm? anonymous?).  You should note the time and date of the interaction and discuss its meaning (do you have this family dinner every night?  Is this a special occasion or ordinary? etc).  You should describe the people in terms of their physical attributes (age, gender, ethnicity, social class) as well as their relationships with one another and with you.  You should also provide any background information that is necessary to understand what is happening in the conversation.  So write a draft initially and return to it when you have finished the transcription to add any details or background context you may have missed on the first go-round.

You should then listen to the tape, first of all to see whether the recording is usable. If words are unclear on the tape, you may be able to remember the context and what was said.  As you listen to the tape, you should type as much as you can hear without making a actual transcription.  Secondly, if there are noises in the background or gestures or facial expressions that you remember being used (which will not be captured on the tape) or if some people left or entered during the conversation, you should note these in relation to the aural information.  I strongly recommend that you listen to the tape as soon as possible after the conversation happened, so that you can use your memory to fill in the gaps of the tape, which captured only what the tape-recorder could "hear."

Transcription
The next step is to make a full transcription of five minutes of the tape.  Choose the five minutes that are most interesting to you or the clearest to transcribe.  If you do this, you should write a description of what the rest of the conversation that you recorded was like and indicate why you picked this particular five minutes.

To transcribe your tape, you will need to play it back slowly and write down all that you hear--all words, all sounds, attributed to their sources.  (If you're not sure who said what or what a sound is exactly, include it, but note this.) This may sound obvious, but it is more difficult than it may seem:

• You will need to be able to stop the tape often and to rewind to review parts of speech which are unclear to you.  This takes a long time! Allow hours for the transcription process.  (It takes me six hours to transcribe one hour of tape.)  Your goal is accuracy.  Include as much pre- and post-conversation (taped or untaped) as you feel is applicable. 
• You will need to pay attention to what the tape has picked up other than just the text of the conversation--sounds the speaker or anyone else makes, including side conversations, people or animals coming in or out, heater rattling, tree branches scratching on the window, glasses clinking, cat meowing, phone ringing, umms and uhhs, coughing, sighing, the works!
• You should account for any starts and stops in the recording itself, and to account for why. (Pause for phone ringing, etc.)
• You will need to consider the non-verbal/non-auditory things that went on during the event, such as gestures, facial expressions, entrances and exits.

• Capturing the overall flow: Few people talk in paragraphs, let alone complete sentences.  This provides a unique challenge to even the most skilled writer.  Use your breaks (line/paragraph) as well as other markers to help indicate flow and emphasis.  This can mean not using punctuation "correctly"--having fragments, run-on sentences, etc. You may determine breaks in terms of content or where the informant pauses--but be aware of what is your choice and what is theirs.
• Capturing vernacular: don't clean it up! Write down exactly what your informants say, as they say it--slang, curses, insider language, dialect, etc. And don't leave out the "umms", "uhhs" or "likes."
• Capturing intonation: use the key in Schiffrin pages 431-432 or Goodwin pages 130-131 to guide you in marking highs and lows, shouts, drawn out words, words trailing off, rapid speech, inbreath, etc.
• Overlapping speech, interruptions, silences and pauses: if one or more person is speaking at the same time, follow Schiffrin's guidelines on pages 431-432 or Goodwin on pages 130-131.
• Words you can't hear: don't make it up! Although if you can make it out with the help of memory, or can remember what it was generally about, put that in brackets.  Use ellipses [...] to indicate missing words.
• Add in non-verbal information: gestures, facial expressions, nervous tics, etc.
• You will want to play back the tape in full one last time after you are finished transcribing it, reading along with your transcription, to see that it is truly accurate to the overall flow as well as the individual nuances.
• Provide a glossary for any insider terms we might not understand.

What is due on Tuesday, November 28th in this order:

• Description of the context and participants
• The run-through of the entire conversation with the transcription of five minutes of conversation where it is located in the run-through
  
• The transcription key explaining what the symbols you used mean
  

Bring two copies as you will be working on your transcription in small groups in class.

This will be your only paper where you are not graded on your understanding of sociological theory and your ability to write an argument-driven paper.  Instead, what will be graded here is meticulousness, thoroughness, and attention to detail.

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