Fieldwork update number 2

Greetings from Jerusalem, once again.

I think I mentioned a second pitfall in my previous post, but at the moment I've probably forgotten all the details because now we're trying to cope with pitfall number 4 - the most serious one yet.

Essentially, we're designing two priming experiments; one with consonantal root priming and another with verbal class (binyan) priming. Coming up with items (words and nonwords) is hard enough; having to counterbalance makes things even tougher. Essentially, to keep the experimental results valid, it's important to avoid giving the same subject a word or root more than once across the entire experiment. This holds not just for target/test items, but also for filler items, and we've spent about a week scrounging for items. Because each experiment has three priming conditions (identity priming, form priming, and unrelated/control priming), that means three different lists of items per experiment.

Ah - this brings me to pitfall number 2: we discovered an entire set of items that were missing. We know they were recorded back in Tucson in November, but given how little time we had, we kept poor track of our files, and somehow misplaced these. When we realized this, we decided to see if our team in Tucson could spring into action for us; luckily, we received superb support and help from a number of people, including two colleagues, a student, and of course, our native speaker of Hebrew in Tucson. Within a day, arrangements were made for him to come to the sound booth and record about 50 words for us - and they were waiting on our server when we woke up the next morning. Miraculous, truly miraculous.

Then, yesterday's pitfall was another minor one but one that requires lengthy, tedious work to fix. Our sound files were not uniformly named, meaning that creating the list of files that the software running the experiment (DMDX) reads ends up being much longer than anticipated. Note to self: implement uniform file naming protocol in the future! Having to put these non-uniform file names into our DMDX file is costing us serious time.

Today, though, we ran into some really aggravating problems. It appears that for some reason, we're missing a number of sound files. This is serious, utterly serious, and may prevent us from readying the experiment file before our departure from Israel (next Tuesday, Dec 30). Although my initial reaction is panic, dread, and total self-hating for letting this happen, I'm now trying to remain calm because even if we have to wait till we're back in Tucson to beg our poor native speaker to come back to the sound booth, we can always record the missing items and send them to the lab in Jerusalem.

However, we have two clocks ticking: the Hebrew clock, and the Maltese clock. On Jan 2, we arrive in Malta to spend four weeks, and in Malta we must be present to run the experiment, unlike in Jerusalem where there's a lab and grad students. It's unclear at this point whether we're going to run into the very same problems with our Maltese sound files and experiment design. So I am doing a lot of emotional work to stay convinced that even if we don't get anything run, we'll still have a productive and worthwhile time, and then we can run these experiments the next time; luckily, I did plan ahead enough to organize a second data collection trip a year from now.

But it's hard, and stressful; at the moment, I feel like quite a failure. I have to keep reminding myself that this is all a learning experience, and that no matter what, our time here has been productive. It's a good lesson in letting go of control, that's for sure!

More later, perhaps...