The First Field Trip: 10 Pieces of Advice

You are a scholar at the beginning of your career, planning to do linguistic fieldwork in a distant location on a little-known language. By some miracle, you have obtained adequate funding, and you are now getting ready to go. Fieldwork is all about meeting your research objectives in less-than-ideal circumstances. This blog post outlines some essential advice for you on the eve of your first major expedition.

1. Give Yourself Time

The number one mistake beginning fieldworkers make is to underestimate the time that doing fieldwork takes. Any fieldwork task can take at least twice as long as the best estimate (and maybe much longer). Therefore, you should set realistic goals and give yourself plenty of time to accomplish them. 

2. Learn from Experience

View this trip as a learning experience. What can you do this time to make future trips better? For example, you can work on creating a network of people in the community who are supportive of and interested in your work. In evaluating the success of your current field trip, consider how well you have set yourself up for future expeditions.

3. Record Everything

Record everything: words, sentences and texts. Even if you are doing syntactic elicitation, record everything. There are three reasons for this. First, if you record, you or other people can verify your data later. Second, by having a recording, you can revisit the data from another angle later on. You never know what you might find that is interesting or important in the future. Third, especially if you are working with an endangered language, generations of people in the future will be interested in hearing your recordings.

4. Notes on Equipment

Try to have backups of all equipment (recorders, mics, cables, SD cards, USB keys, batteries, etc.). Test all equipment (including cables, batteries, chargers, adapters) before going to the field. Download e-copies of all your manuals and put them in one place on your computer, including manuals for cameras, mics, speakers, audio recorders, etc. These are searchable and might come in handy in the field.

5. Backup Your Work

Make daily backups of your work onto an external hard drive. You never know when your computer will die so do not rely on it for primary storage. Get an external hard drive, and make backups at the end of each day. It only takes a few minutes. Devise a scheme to label your files so that you know exactly where everything is. Create a metadata file, and update it periodically.

6. Plan your Daily Work

On July 13, in the morning, what are you going to do? Are you going to work on the lexicon? If so, how will you elicit words? Which semantic fields are you going to work with? Are you going to work on syntax? If so, what topic will you be looking at? What kinds of hypotheses are you trying to test? What kinds of constructions will you be looking at? What is your methodology? Plan your sessions, but also try to be flexible. You never know what kinds of problems will come up in the field. 

7. Expect the Unexpected

Even the best-laid plans of mice and men can go awry. You need to understand that and to be ready for it. For example, people might not show up to sessions, your equipment might fail, your research might not go as expected, you might have health problems. Be ready for anything, but also be flexible. Don’t be too hard on yourself if some aspect of your project falls through. Consider it a learning experience.

8. Learn to Speak the Language

Your objective is to understand the syntactic phenomena of the language. There are many ways to approach this. But I have found that you can learn as much about the syntax of a language by trying to learn how to speak it as you can by any other means (e.g., elicitation, texts, lexicon). Chat with your consultants in their language. Go to meet their families. Get out into the community and strike up a conversation. Have fun!

9. Take Time to Train Your Consultants

You have been learning linguistics and syntax for a very long time, so you may view things as obvious that are not at all obvious to non-linguists. Take the time to explain to your consultants what you are investigating. If you have a task that you need them to do, set aside time to explain it to them carefully and to practice doing it.

10. Write up Results in the Field

When you gather some interesting data, start to write up your results in the field. Even writing a very rough draft can be useful in guiding you toward other data points (e.g., minimal pairs) that you need in your argumentation, and in giving you a picture of where your work is going.