Ready, Set, ... GO!

*Closes HyperResearch and ELAN and exhales with relief*

A hellish job it was: translating 20 hours of filmed interviews and stories from Adamorobe sign language, and coding about 1500 pages of field notes and interview translations.

Originally, it took me ages to merely translate 2 minutes of a video which I played at 70% of the realtime speed (you’d be baffled to know how much one can say in 2 minutes!), but towards the end it went smoothly on normal speed and I even almost didn’t have to rewind any more. I set a rule for myself: translating 15 minutes of film data every day – and I couldn’t even bring myself to doing a measly 10 seconds extra.

What that consisted of – a method perfected for and by myself during the months I spent doing it – was: staring at my screen completely fixated for two minutes and pressing the space bar (start-stop-start-stop), scribbling down every sentence in a hand writing only decipherable by myself on a A4 sheet folded in the length, and per piece of 2 minutes, typing everything in a window in ELAN (a sign language analysis programme) of which it took me a full 2 months to discover I could enlarge it to something bigger than 5 by 5 centimetres.

In the meantime, my mind is constantly and neurotically trying to ‘breathe’ (as in: escape) and I click towards e-mails, the website of ‘De Standaard’ (Belgian newspaper) and Facebook. My three big pals and at the same time my enemies in these days. It was a challenge, for my willpower, discipline and patience, as much as the challenge I faced by staying in Adamorobe. And this yet again, and again, and again. For five whole months. I scribbled through a pile of (draft-)A4 sheets of about 10 to 20 centimetres high. I cannot bear to see any more draft paper. I cannot bear to see any more of ELAN. I cannot bear to see any more of the green (film-)background of my bedroom in Adamorobe.

And then, when after 3 hours I had struggled through about 15 minutes of film and could finally, contented, place aside my draft paper, the ‘clicking work’ began, as I started calling it after a while. In the programme HyperResearch there’s a window with your text (field notes) and there’s a window with a list of 500 terms: codes. A list which I built up myself, along the way. You read some sentences from field notes and with a few mouse clicks, you assign to them one or more codes (themes), for example: ‘marry rules’, ‘police does not take deaf’, ‘white visitors: deaf stories and refs’, or ‘church: role, meaning’, or ‘traditional religion: deaf roles+participation’. So later, when I want to write about a theme or a group of themes, I just have to click on the code and my screen will show everything that has been linked to that theme between 15th October 2008 and 15th October 2009 – everything that has been said, that happened, has been signed or written. One thousand five hundred pages. Five hundred codes. Five thousand marked text fragments.

A routine job without many challenges (except for the challenge my capricious character had to face).

But what I noticed, thought and felt every day is: “WOW!” Innumerable ‘Aha-erlebnises’. Innumerable palpitations of my heart and innumerable shots for my enthusiasm. The data I gathered in Adamorobe is extremely rich, multi-faceted and thorough. Fantastic! I can do SO much with it! I have tons of ideas of how to bring it all together, how to link and connect it all! And during coding, how many times have I thought: “Oh!! I forgot that part! That should be in it, in my PhD! And thàt and thàt and thattt…” I almost bursted at the seams of sheer ‘lust’ and enthusiasm to get it started.

And now, I’m finally there, after 5 months of scribbling and clicking: that mountain is in front of me, that mountain of data which was intricately intertwined at first, chaotic, dark and huge; is now arranged, structured, deciphered and mapped. I wish my PhD could contain a million words. Only eighty thousand words I get to put it together. “Is loads, isn’t it”, you think? Think again! It’s only about 200 pages with double line spacing. And that also has to include methodology, literature review,… And I don’t want to butcher my great data. And, and, and… A new stream of brain twists is being formed. But err… I’m ready. I’m set. Let’s GO!