One bird with one stone: Your phone can’t (and shouldn’t) replace your other data-collection tools
A common sentiment that I have encountered among folks doing fieldwork is that the smartphone has made the need for dedicated cameras and voice recorders irrelevant or unnecessary for audio/visual (A/V) data collection. I strenuously object to this opinion for five specific reasons:
1. Things go wrong all the time.
Redundancy is a self-defense mechanism. Interviews and site visits are intrusive and time-consuming at best, and in most cases they’re a one-shot deal. If your phone is doing double- or triple-duty, you’re creating a situation where a single point of failure can compromise the quality of the data you’re trying to collect. Of course, you can (and should) also take written notes, but when you’re working solo, there’s always going to be a trade-off between mindfully guiding the conversation with the interviewee and taking detailed and accurate notes. I’m skeptical of anyone who claims that they can do both simultaneously.
If you’re reliant on your phone and something happens to it in the field, you’re screwed. If you’re depending on a camera or a voice-recorder and something goes wrong, you’ve still got your smartphone to fall back on. And if it all goes wrong, you can at least tell your client in good conscience that you took full precautionary measures.
2. A tool that’s meant to do the work of two other tools will do neither one as well.
I love the camera on my phone. I’ve never really considered myself to be a particularly good photographer, I just take lots of pictures with the philosophy that (as Stalin once said) “quantity has a quality of its own.” If I take enough pictures, eventually I’ll take a good one. Thanks to my phone’s optics and processor chip, I think I’ve at least been moderately successful at that.
But. I also have a digital camera that’s ten years older than my phone, and 9 times out of 10 it still takes better pictures than my phone. Similarly, my phone’s voice recorder function is perfectly fine under normal conditions, but its audio clarity just can’t compete with the versatility and range of the microphone on a dedicated voice recorder…And people mumble…a lot.
When you can, use the right tool for the right job.
3. You want to look professional.
In his eternally relevant absurdist sci-fi series “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Douglas Adams explains why an intergalactic hitchhiker should always carry a towel:
“a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a [non-hitchhiker] discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the [non-hitchhiker] will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost." What the [non-hitchhiker] will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”
If you begin an interview by taking your voice recorder out of its case and laying it on the table in front of the interviewee, or if you pull a professional-looking camera out of your backpack during your visit to a Guatemalan sewage-processing plant, the people you’re talking with are far more likely to assume that you are definitely a professional who absolutely knows what he or she is doing and they will treat you accordingly. There is no substitute for that.
The aforementioned Guatemalan sewage-processing plant
4. You want to be trusted by the people you talk to.
In a similar vein to #3, when you use (or deliberately don’t use) a dedicated voice-recorder or camera for A/V data collection you’re setting a higher implicit standard for the work you’re doing. It doesn’t just make you look more professional when you use it; putting the device away when asked to do so communicates a higher level of confidentiality and/or anonymity to the people who you are requesting information from.
5. Portability means a lot in uncertain situations.
There are a variety of reasons to keep your professional and personal devices separate, but one of them is this simple truth: There is an unmistakable benefit to being able to hand-off or mail a singular physical object – whether it is a device or a removable data storage card – to someone else on your team in a fluid or uncertain situation, especially if you can’t immediately back-up your data to the internet.
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Worst-Case Scenario: Have you ever had to spontaneously interview someone on speakerphone? Can your phone record that interview? Probably…But what if the person you’ve been trying to schedule an interview with for the past five days suddenly calls you and tells you that they can’t meet up with you to talk later today, but they can do the interview right now while they’re driving to pick up their daughter from her dance recital? Can you figure out how to record the interview with the phone you’re currently talking on while you’re sitting at your hotel room desk trying to take notes on a tiny hotel notepad while also simultaneously pulling up the interview template on your laptop? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just grab the voice recorder out of your backpack and focus on whatever your three most important questions are?
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Ultimately, it’s your decision. And of course, the constraints of time and money mean that we don’t always have the luxury of carrying a second or third device with us when we set out to do fieldwork. But in the immortal words of my grandfather:
“Better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.”
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