ipod recording

[Claire Bowern]

A sociolinguist I know recently started work on documenting variation in 
a US city. She was talking to a sociologist who had demographic data on 
the city for the past 40 years or so, and he mentioned that he'd been 
doing in depth interviews with a cross-section of the population for the 
last few years. The interviews were all "digitally" recorded and 
transcribed, and there was about 150 hours of speech there. *However*, 
since the interviews were recorded with mp3 recorders, all those data 
were useless for the sociolinguistics research, and the project has to 
start from scratch. If the sociologists had used an uncompressed format, 
it wouldn't have mattered much to them, but would have made all the 
difference to the linguistics project, and would have saved a heap of 
time. This is English, so it's not hard to recreate the sample base 
(just time-consuming), but if it had been an endangered language, it 
would have severely limited the utility of the corpus in a way that we 
just can't afford, given how few people work on most languages.
Claire