After the Interview

Now the interview is over. We are left with a tape, or many tapes. It is important to listen to your tapes as soon as you can, while the interview is still fresh in your mind. If anything important happened that was not recorded on the tape, write it down.

Some people try to write down every word on their tapes. This is called transcribing. Transcribing takes a very long time-—an hour or more for Just five minutes of tape. It is easier, and faster, to write down a list of the things that are said without trying to catch every word.

If someone talked about life in a lumbercamp, you could write down the subjects as they were talked about: food in the lumbercamp, who did the cooking, how the beds were made, problems with lice, getting around in heavy snow, caring for the horses and so on. Most tape recorders have a counter. Start the counter at 000 at the beginning of the tape. Write down the counter number when every new subject begins. That way, you will always be able to find those subjects on that tape recorder again. What you write is called a tape table of contents. (The counters work differently on every tape recorder, so this only works well if you use the same tape recorder when you go back to the tape.)

Of course, sometimes people will say things that are so important, or said in such a nice way that you really do want to write down every word. As you do your tape table of contents, you can mark those places and transcribe them later. You can also put the words you want to transcribe into your tape table of contents as you make it.

When the tape table of contents is finished, look for the things you do not understand, and the things you want to know more about. If there are a lot of these, you need a second interview with the same person. The second interview is more focused. We have a much better idea which questions to ask, and what we can find out. But it is still a good idea to give the person lots of time to talk.

When you have finished writing down the contents of your tape, you have collected new information. Sometimes, this is information that no one else has ever collected before. The facts and stories you have gathered on your tape can be used with written information to help create a more complete picture of your topic.