Making the best use of interviews

I love my recorder very very much. I use an Olympus WS-311 M digital voice recorder. It's nifty. It's a little bigger than a pack of gum. It takes a triple A battery, it plugs into the USB on my laptop, and it shows up on my desktop. The sounds is great, I couldn't recommend it more highly. Evidently it is also a music player if that is important to you.

Digital is particularly handy. I use quicktime to listen to recordings, and I file them away on my external hard drive when I am done with whatever it is I am working on. This is a huge advantage over tapes. I have to keep recordings of interviews for a certain amount of time for legal reasons but they're hard to file. They're clutter.

That said, I still loath going back to them.

Some things I have learned —
-Review your notes as soon as you have the chance to debrief.
- When you're writing go back to your notes before you go back to the recording.
- While I take notes longhand during the actual interview, taking notes by hand from the recording just takes work. Instead by using "apple-tab" I can switch between apps, from quicktime to word and back to pause and play the recording while I transcribe relevant passages.
- Despite my best efforts it is impossible to transcribe an interview with music on, even brain food music.
- When transcribing, make sure you capture what they were trying to say not just what came out. People don't always say what they mean to say, they pause at inopportune moments and they start saying one thing but change their mind and finish saying something else.

I am currently exploring the possibility of learning short hand — It doesn't look promising for the short term though.