I sometimes share my sarges with the wider community. You’ll find some of them on my site here – updated from time to time. Check back for updates.

A lot of my sarge recordings though simply don’t see the light of day because they are mainly for my educational benefit. Reviewing field experiences from your memory is one thing but listening to or watching authentic field data is far more useful.

There is simply so much happening in field that it is almost impossible to remember or keep track consciously of all the nuances occurring in an interaction. You remember some of it but it’s fascinating to review it all after the fact (remember to keep an overall outward focus in field so as to calibrate well and not get caught up inside your own head).

Currently I record as follows:

Audio

1. Creative MuVo N200 mp3 player/recorder. 1GB memory. Small size. Easily concealable. Decent quality recordings. Recommended.

2. Creative Zen Neeon mp3 recorder. 6GB. A bit larger than the N200 but with a higher quality mic/recording system. Really nice quality recordings and somehow seems to retain a good level of intelligibility even in a loud club. Battery only lasts a few hours when recording though.

3. Sony Ericsson 810i phone. 1GB memory card. Handy for recording because it’s always with me. It does the job and is not noticed as a sound recorder because it is accepted as a phone only.

Video

Sony Ericsson 810i. 1GB memory card. Decent video recordings for a phone. Records sound too. I tend to wear it around my neck when recording. People register it only as a phone not a video camera. Requires the image to be flipped 270 degrees during editing to make the image the right way up – done with Movie Maker. Can be converted to mpg or avi from the mov/3gp recording format. Does the biz innocuously.

In Hong Kong I’ve seen button hole video cameras and mini cameras that send video via radio waves to receiver in a bag. They might give a better quality recording but seem to result in more techno hassle and you’d have some explaining to do if a target finds the camera hidden in your tie. At least with a camera phone or mp3 player you can excuse it and say – ‘It’s my phone/my music player’.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 15th, 2007 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Field Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.