{"id":47,"date":"2010-05-05T15:54:24","date_gmt":"2010-05-05T22:54:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tabithahart.net\/?p=47"},"modified":"2010-05-05T17:49:40","modified_gmt":"2010-05-06T00:49:40","slug":"recording-skype-based-interviews-on-a-mac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/?p=47","title":{"rendered":"Recording Skype interviews on a Mac"},"content":{"rendered":"

For my current research project I used Skype to conduct a series of distal interviews<\/a> with participants spread all across the United States.\u00a0 I found Skype to be an excellent platform for this purpose:\u00a0 it was easy for participants to procure, free for my interviewees to download, inexpensive for me,\u00a0and user-friendly for everybody.\u00a0 Happily, with the use of Audio Hijack Pro it was also a simple matter to record the interviews (with participants\u2019 permission, natch).<\/p>\n

There are three key reasons why I make it a practice to record interviews whenever possible.\u00a0 These may be obvious, but (at risk of preaching to the choir) I\u2019ll list them here.\u00a0 First, although I take copious notes during interviews*, I cannot jot down, verbatim, 100% of what my interviewees say.\u00a0 Even on my best days I estimate that I lose a good 10% or more of the exact words my interviewees utter.\u00a0 Having a recording ensures that every valuable word shared by interviewees is saved.\u00a0 Second, handwritten notes typically do not capture paralinguistic cues such as interviewees\u2019 volume, pitch, inflection, intensity, speed, or silence.\u00a0 Because such nonverbal cues convey as much meaning as actual words, it\u2019s vital to have an accurate recording of them.\u00a0 Finally, recordings allow for the possibility of having transcription support.\u00a0 You can\u2019t very well give someone a sheaf of barely legible scribbled notes and ask them to transcribe them.\u00a0 You could, however, give a transcriptionist a recording and ask them to prepare a typewritten copy of what has been said.<\/p>\n

There are numerous software choices for recording Skype calls, but because I have a Mac, I opted to buy Audio Hijack Pro<\/a>. \u00a0Once AHP is installed, you simply open it up and select the application that you want to record from (in this case, Skype). When you are ready, you click \u201crecord.\u201d\u00a0 That was about as technical as I got with my recordings, but there are plenty more options with AHP for scheduling, tagging, organizing, and modifying your files.<\/p>\n

All of my recordings were saved onto my hard drive as mp3 files, and I used VLC<\/a> to play them back while I was transcribing them.<\/p>\n

*Always in a Moleskine<\/a>, one of the nicest (paper) notebooks out there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For my current research project I used Skype to conduct a series of distal interviews with participants spread all across the United States.\u00a0 I found Skype to be an excellent platform for this purpose:\u00a0 it was easy for participants to procure, free for my interviewees to download, inexpensive for me,\u00a0and user-friendly for everybody.\u00a0 Happily, with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54,"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions\/54"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tabithahart.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}