ANTHRO 50-xx: Linguistic Anthropology :

Weekly Language Fieldnotes Format

When: Every Monday afternoon (3pm) starting February 11th until April. 15th.
How: By e-mail (nakamura@mac...)

Every Monday afternoon you will be required to hand in language fieldnotes. You should follow an alternating schedule of handing in raw transcripts one week followed by your analysis the second week. You should try to pick a field site where you will be able to openly tape-record conversants with their consent and where the conversations are rich and interesting. Your fieldsite should lead to your final project. More information on fieldsites and the final project is located here. There are specific requirements for the fieldsites:

  1. Must be off-campus / non-Mac
  2. As far as possible, all participants must be consent to and be aware of the presence of the tape recording. Ethical safeguards are the responsibility of the students.
  3. Participants must not be engaged in illegal or dangerous (to self / other) activities – no crackhouse conversations please

 

Transcripts: You should transcribe your conversations using either of the two transcription methods in the Ochs handout. Transcribing is a very slow and laborious process. You should allocate at least 4x to 6x as much time to transcribe (i.e., one minute of tape takes about 5 minutes to transcribe). Thus, you should not try to transcribe your entire tape, just 3-4 minutes of the most interesting part. "Interesting" here means interesting in a linguistic anthropological sense -- i.e., is this showing any evidence of power, unity, control, identity, performance, etc. Length 3-5 pages. The transcripts should also include:

  1. Date (including day of week)
  2. Time
  3. Setting (dorm room, restaurant, class, etc.)
  4. Speaker(s)
  5. Listener(s)
  6. Very important: Number the lines!

Analysis Papers: Write a short paper to comment on what made your snippet of conversation interesting from the linguistic anthropological perspective. You should incorporate sections from your transcript to illustrate your points as well as respond to the readings and lectures. Length: 3-4 pages.

Grading: I will grade each week's notes on a scale from 1-5. They constitute 20% of your final grade. You are not required to write any fieldnotes past April 15th (Week 12) since I expect you to be working on your final paper in earnest during this time.

8 weeks - x 5 points = 20%.