McLellan never told me there'll be days like this

My core fieldwork with bagiin emch, between May and October of this year, yielded 45 hours and 6 minutes of recorded interviews.  These interviews form a major part of my field data, complementing field notes, annotated photographs, and structured baseline data.  Originally I had planned for selective transcriptions based on my field notes, primarily because of the transcription time involved: I estimated 225 hours of work for native Mongolian speakers to transcribe the entire corpus.  Not to mention working with the data.  In November, however, I decided for full transcription with the expectation that I'll reanalyze the data later for other purposes.  Just over 4 weeks ago I began hiring students from the National University of Mongolia (MUIS) to do this work, through the American Center for Mongolian Studies (ACMS).

Most of what I have to say about managing the transcription process, I'll say in a separate post - or maybe posts.  Today I want to share a couple episodes I've had with my transcribers in the past two weeks, mostly centered around text message (SMS) exchanges.  The text messages that I've transcribed below are original, including abbreviations and misspellings, except that I've anonymized them.  The translations of the Mongolian messages aren't academic standard.

EPISODE ONE

This one started on 4-Dec-2007 with a female transcriber that we'll call H (not her real initial).  That evening, just 20 minutes after arriving home from meeting all my transcribers at MUIS, I received this message from her phone:

Sent 19:36:24: Ta uduur msg bichsen bna le dongoj sai awla uulzax yamai ajiltai bsan

(I just got the message you sent today. What work did you have to meet for?)

Misunderstanding the message, and assuming it was H, I responded:

Sent approx. 19:37: Zugeer, zugeer.  Uulzsan tegeed hamagui.

(It's all good. We met so it doesn't matter.)

At 7:40pm my phone rang.  It was H's phone number and I still thought it was H.  I had previously told all my transcribers to dohih, or "missed call", me if they ever wanted to talk so I waited.  After the 3rd ring I picked up.  There was a young man on the other end.  He didn't introduce himself, but he demanded to know what I was doing with H, so I figured he was a boyfriend or brother.  I explained that I worked with MUIS and she was working with me through MUIS, but he wasn’t hearing it.  He was talking loud and fast, and he said za yu after every 5-10 words, so I could tell he was angry.  The only intelligible message I got was that he was going to beat me tomorrow.  He kept on this for a while, so I eventually hung up on him.  I then received this message:

Sent 19:47:09: Chi axij ine tere ged [H-]d msg bichex yum bol chamaig sain zodon shvv bi nz zaluun bna

(You try to come up on H again like this and I'll beat your ass good. This is H's boyfriend.)

Irritated, I quickly typed up this response, which would require 2 messages to send because of its length:

Sent 21:04:33: Chi sain sonsooch.  Bi muis-tai erdemteneer ajilaj bga.  Bi [H]-tei bas 3 uur oyutantai jinhene ajil hj bga. Bi g-iin bagsh. Tegeed chi nadtai ingeej yarich yostoi bolohgui. Chi [H]-tei oroi uulzaad nadruu zalgach. Meduu?

(Now you listen up good.  I'm working as a scholar at MUIS.  I've got work with H and 3 other students.  I'm her teacher, so you got no place talking to me like this.  When you meet H tonight, call me.  Got it, son?)

Due to continuing problems with Mobicom SMS at night – this had been going on in the evenings for about a week – it took about 20 tries and more than an hour to actually send.  I think the delay took some of the oomph out of my message.

I texted H the following day about our next meeting but didn't get any response.  I didn't try to call until two days later.  When I did her phone was turned off.  For the next 9 days I didn't see her, didn't hear from her, and couldn't reach her on her phone.  I heard she was ok and generally around, so I put the word out with a couple of her friends to have her call me.  She finally called on the afternoon 13-Dec-2007 from a white phone - recognizable by the "55" prefix - when I was at the Health Sciences University.  She explained that she lost her mobile phone and we agreed to meet on Friday afternoon at ACMS.

When we met, the first order of business I had with her was to talk about this exchange with her purported boyfriend.  I showed her the last SMS that I received from her phone.  She said it couldn't have been her boyfriend because he lives in Bayan-Ulgii and that it might have been someone else playing a joke.  But after explaining when this happened, she said that was the day she lost her phone.  I suspect somebody she knows took her phone because he spelled her very uncommon name correctly after only hearing me say it on the phone.  But I also think there's more to the story than I've got right now.

EPISODE TWO

On Saturday one of my transcribers quit three days after being hired:

Sent 13:09:30: hi. jaspal my doctor told me that you need to stay in hospital. well I can’t work for you i am sorry. i wanted to work but i have heartache. on tuesday [H] will give your mp3 and ear…!

The McLellan in the title refers to an article that is a must-read for anybody managing transcription of field data in anything other than small projects:

McLellan E, MacQueen KM, Neidig JL. "Beyond the Qualitative Interview: Data Preparation and Transcription", Field Methods 15(1): 63-84.

Comments

[tater-tot]

Not possible.

[R]

In Episode 3 Jaspal turns to the dark-side and kills all the Jedi babies...

[Ulaana]

Not really shocked, but a little freaked! I'm still trying to stop mine from using Arial Mon font!

[Jaspal]

The prequel isn't where it's at. Episode 5 - "The Transcribers Strike Back" - ought to be a good one.

Ulaana, they can type Cyrillic and Roman characters with Times New Roman. In order to achieve some consistency, I provided my transcribers with specific instructions (zaavar) on all technical aspects of transcription.