Fourteenth and Fifteenth classes: Interviewing, Transcribing

By now, you should know the drill: everything one can say about photography and ethnography one can say about interviewing: it is doing what you do in your day to day world anyway, only a bit more structured.

An interview is a conversation: like most conversations (as opposed to idle chit chat, which is swell but something different) it has a point. You are talking about something. But it is as much an opportunity for communion as it is an instrument in data mining (perhaps more the former than the latter). So you don't go into it with a strict "must get answers to these questions" mentality. It is not an oral questionnaire. No matter what ethics boards want to tell you to do, you can;t predict the course of an interview any more than you can predict the course of a conversation. You can make intelligent guesses, and have intelligent expectations, but it isn't rocket science (it's harder than rocket science, because you are dealing with the trajectories of human interaction (see how I did that with the word 'trajectories'? I'm balls to the wall clever sometimes)).

But you know this already, don't you? Because you all slavishly read the Statement of the American Folklore Society On Research with Human Subjects, particularly where it says:

On occasion, a folklorist may employ a questionnaire or other survey instrument at the initial stages of research, but these are rapidly abandoned in favor of close conversation, careful observation, and prolonged participation.

and

There is almost no folklore research that can be conducted using a pre-formulated set of questions. As folklorists learn more about the traditions that are the focus of their research, the kinds of questions they ask will necessarily change. Each response provokes new and unanticipated questions, each question leads to new areas of inquiry. In folklore and other ethnographic research, the questions to be asked cannot be known or formulated in advance. In many respects, folklore research is a type of investigative journalism; but it is deeper, longer lasting, and more responsible: the bonds established between the researchers and community members are more personal and enduring.

and

Folklore research presents no more risk to human subjects than any sustained, deep, and wide-ranging conversation about cultural beliefs and social practices.

So that's that.

After the interview is the transcription. You will all have read Ives (on reserve at the library). And, based on the exercise in class, creating a transcription is a subjective exercise: no two will be exactly the same, and each will depend not so much on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the transcriber as on the way they choose to interpret the recording. How literal one is in terms of trying to capture accent, how one uses punctuation to express pauses, changes in thought and idea, etc., are as much framing devices as what one chooses to write down in the ethnography and what one puts in the picture in photography.

Get the interview assignment handout here.