Week 11: Documentation and Experience (Althea)

I have decided to use ethnographic research as the method to study how information glut may affect the traveler's experience. Some kinds of records and data that I can foresee producing include voice recordings of interviews and webpages/social media from which my participants collect travel information from.

If I had the time and resources, I would get the interviews transcribed so that I can have hard copies of the interviews. However, voice recordings are usually deleted once the project is completed, especially since it's stipulated in the consent form we sign with participants before beginning fieldwork, so there will not be a question of how I'll have to preserve them. I know there is doubt about whether deleted files really get deleted, and studies have shown that they are still retrievable, but I believe the ethics protocol expects us to take reasonable care for such issues. I do not know if it's reasonable to expect that someone would use a software to comb through my computer for the files after I have deleted them. Besides, this is why we should always place a password lock on our computer, and if we were to keep soft-copy of research related documents on the computer, to always keep a computer by our sides (at least, that's what I'm taught to do).

Since the web pages and social media are publicly accessible, these will probably not have to be deleted. If I choose to keep and preserve them, I will probably make screenshots and put them in a folder, both on my computer and in the cloud, and print them out as hard copies to be kept safely. My ideas about the preservation of research materials are largely influenced by what I have been taught in anthropology research courses. My professor then had always emphasized that we should make hard copies if we ever want to keep anything permanently because digital objects and formats become obsolete.

However, I have also discussed the issue of digital obsolescence with a friend who firmly believes in the prowess of technology. He told me that people will be able to create technology that will allow us to convert file formats or read older file formats just like they did before, just like how we can now convert VHS into DVDs.