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Nice follow up to David's post on Dedoose's crash

For those of us looking for free cloud transcription service! Here's a great review from a KUOW Reporter.... "Register at http://www.voicebase.com, upload your audio, do something else for 10 minutes to an hour or two (the wait varies apparently), and it will do a rough but surprisingly not-bad transcription for you. What I've done is then paste that "machine transcript" into a Word doc (or you can download it) and correct major errors in it as I listen to my original audio. Much faster (and a lot less typing) than trying to log tape from scratch. Voicebase.com lets you do 50 hours of audio transcribing free. I did it for a half-hour interview I'd taped in the studio; I don't know how Voicebase will perform on phone tape, audio with ambient noise behind it, speakers with accents, interviews with more than one person, etc. But for my purposes, it was pretty freaking awesome."

One perspective on which digital tools are most effective (and practical) for ethnographic fieldwork.

Pretty convincing post about the potential for using the ubiquitous smartphone and cloud-based tools in ethnographic settings...but there are some assumptions, as well as some breaks with "tradition" (a few obvious, a few not so much...). I've been using my iPhone in a few ways that parallel the systems Horan has developed, and would be happy to explore some of these tools/apps/affordances...

I agree with some of his techniques, although I still find hand written field notes to be useful. You might be more inclined to write certain things down in the field rather than speak them out loud to be recorded in front of the people you are working with. I also was interested in his section on "local currency." ("Local Currency Whether we want to admit it or not, money talks. Obviously, one should adhere to the local customs regarding the proper use of money in every situation, but spending money can gain you access to areas of life that may otherwise be closed off to you. Generosity in time and money goes a long way, so remember to bring cash to gain access to people and places that you may be unfamiliar with.") This section seems to leave out the fact that spending money in a way which is not culturally appropriate can be as detrimental in certain cases, as it is helpful in other situations.