ask about amongst your colleagues or friends to see if they can translate (part of) it for you. Prior to paying someone to translate a whole document – which is quite expensive – you really need to check whether that document will be central and what level of detail you need to work with. Do you need a word-for-word translation, will a brief summary suffice, or do you only need specific parts translated?
As you will (hopefully) be working quite closely on the documents, you really need copies of the original documents. When working with documents from libraries, as well as internal organizational documents, you will often not be allowed to take the original documents away from the building. With some documents, often due to age (and within organizations, potential sensitivity), you may not be able to photograph or photocopy any of the documents and so will only be able to make notes. Bear in mind you can only take so many notes or do so much verbatim copying by hand (or preferably onto a computer) in any one visit. Also, some libraries may have restrictions on both the number of documents you can request on each visit as well as the number of documents you can photocopy at any one time.
A final point is to remember to take detailed notes of where that document (or that specific quote) came from, whilst you are actually collecting the documents. Despite my good intentions, whilst writing up I usually find at least one document or quote that I have absolutely no idea where I got it from nor have any references for. Please try not to echo my mistake.
Some closing comments on working with documents
In general, you work with a range of documents, covering both:
primary sources: historically contemporary and/or first-hand accounts; and
secondary sources: historically or spatially distant and/or second-hand accounts.
For example, I became interested in why, when we visit the theatre, we all sit very quietly, become relatively immobile and condemn others (and sometimes feel anger towards others) for breaching these rules. I went to various archives and generated a collection of materials around the audience in London’s theatres. I learned that it is only in the recent past, over a period between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially around the 1880s, that theatre-goers became increasingly ‘tamed’. Prior to this, audiences did things like shout at actors to repeat what they felt were well-delivered monologues, talked to their friends who had purchased the more expensive seats that were placed on stage, or threw food at actors whom they felt were ‘bad’. The shift from the more carnivalesque occurrences of past audiences to today’s docile assembly was mediated by various trajectories, including:
the growth of a new middle class (with new ‘polite’ values and norms);
the introduction of gas stage lighting (with the audience now sitting in darkness); and
the entrepreneurship of certain theatre owners (with the building and refurbishment of theatres to cater for the new, refined, middle classes).
This research was made possible by using secondary sources – more ‘academic’ books and articles on the history of theatrical performance, design, production and ownership – and primary sources, such as nineteenth-century critics’ commentaries on certain productions and audience behaviour, actors and audience members’ diaries and letters, newspaper articles, debates in Parliament and theatrical trade publications.
Often the best starting point is to read other academic work on the specific topic and to find out what documents they used and where they found them. These secondary sources will generally provide commentaries on and copies of (parts of) the original documents and may contain the details of the specific places they sourced the original documents from. Generally, you will want to focus your analysis on these or other original documents, on primary sources, rather than just relying on these secondary accounts.
Even if your research is not primarily focused on how the press, academics, individuals or organizations render knowledge about your specific topic, or you are not really interested in tracing the history and development of ideas, practices or institutions that we take for granted today, documents about that topic can help you engage with and re-think the research. They are vital resources for any form of research, be it as part of the stages or practices called ‘literature reviews’, ‘background reading’ or ‘producing questions for focus groups’ or as ways to spark new (and old, long forgotten) thoughts about your research. As such, being aware of and engaged with text-based documents is essential to all research practice. The other key source in contemporary research practice is audio- and visual-based sources. It is to these that we now turn.
Audio- and visual-based sources
As with documents, you have a wide and ever-growing variety of potential sources to work with. With document-based research you are working with materials that already exist, often in a published form; your major issue is generally just getting access to them. When working with audio- and visual-based sources some of these materials already exist, like television programmes, whereas with others you have to take some part in generating them, like interviews or videos of interactions.
There are various sources to work with; for example, some people work with recordings of all types of radio and television programmes. A lot of work has been undertaken on news interviews, both radio- and television-based. Heritage and Greatbatch (1991) have used audio and video recordings of the news to understand the interactional work that occurs between the news interviewer and their interviewees. For example, rather than say something like ‘You’re an idiot’, news interviewers routinely say something like ‘Mr Smith says you’re idiot’ or ‘Some people say you’re an idiot’. This is just one of the practices that locally produces the ‘impartiality’ or ‘objectivity’ of news interviewing and so sustains the impartial status of the institution of news interviews. This style of work involves a very detailed focus on the interactional work of the speakers – the form of the talk – and is often less concerned with the specific topic that is actually being talked about on the programme. Williams et al. (2003) take a different approach, where the actual content of the talk was the focus. They were concerned to understand how information about embryonic stem cell research was portrayed throughout the news media. They used recordings of news reporting, focusing on the televised debates, alongside newspaper articles to outline how the ethical arguments of those for and against stem cell research were covered by the media.
Researchers have also analyzed documentaries, focusing on how the programme works to produce its specific account as ‘factual’ and/or ‘objective’, alongside exploring what specific version of the world the documentary outlines. Others have focused on radio talk-shows. Some research has focused more on the content of these phone-in programmes, the specific topics covered or the debates. Others, like Hutchby (1996), focused more on the form of such programmes. He outlined how the hosts of these programmes work to encourage debate: rather than remaining neutral, they routinely take the opposite point of view to the caller and so encourage argumentative talk, as well as sometimes openly agreeing with the caller’s perspective.
Whatever approach has been taken, all these researchers had to generate their own specific archives of materials. Some of them obtained the recordings of specific programmes from another archive that already existed. For example, Williams et al. (2003) had access to an archive that contained all the main TV bulletins and UK national newspaper articles that focused on human genetics research in the year 2000. In this case, someone had already collected all the relevant (national) material for them and so their analysis was based on a subsample of that archive. All they had to do was search through that archive to find all the materials that referred to stem cell research. In general, you will rarely be that fortunate. Such comprehensive archives may not exist for your specific topic area. However, in saying that, it is always worth checking out if any do exist. They may be held by specific academics, academic departments or specialized libraries.
More routinely, you will have to start from scratch and actually discover and record your own material. Recording, then, can often be relatively