Documenting with a smartphone

Presented at the Language Documentation and Archiving Conference, Berlin & Online, 4-6 Sept, 2024, by Bradley McDonnell, Jillian Breithaupt, Nathan Adamson, Kelsey Bialo, Lauren Cornwell, Tyler Demmon, Stephanie Dossett, Orlyn Esquivel, Irina Kolenskaia, Vihan Li. Tracy Preslar and Gillian Sawyer. Documentary linguistics has long recognized the usefulness of smartphones as their use has become almost ubiquitous the world over. This recognition has led to the development of apps that allow anyone with a smartphone to document their language (Bird et al. 2014). At the same time, smartphones as a primary means of documenting the range of linguistic and cultural practices has been discouraged (e.g. Seyfeddinipur & Rau 2020). In a rapidly changing marketplace where tech companies like Apple and Samsung are prioritizing cameras for capturing high-quality images and audiovisual recordings, we aim to determine how well smartphones fare against cameras and camcorders in three different use cases: audio recording, video recording, and document (e.g. fieldnotes) scanning. Size limitations imposed on smartphone cameras mandates smaller sensors and lenses than those used in standalone cameras, which results in images with higher levels of noise as each pixel sees much less light (Abdelhamed, Lin & Brown 2018). Compared to DSLRs, smartphones are subject to very large fields of depth, small pixel sizes, and limitations in optical zoom capabilities (Blahnik & Schindelbeck 2021). However, recent studies claim that despite such limitations, image/video captured on current smartphone cameras are hardly distinguishable from those of professional cameras in many everyday situations with plenty of ambient lighting (Pattanayak, Malik & Verma 2021). In fact, within the last decade, many academic fields have leveraged smartphones for research, including linguistics (Leemann et al. 2020; Hilton & Leemann 2021). In an effort to understand the limitations of smartphones, we compare the outputs of several recent models of smartphones to those of well regarded professional/prosumer cameras, camcorders, and audio recorders in the contexts in which language documenters record speech events as well as scan paper documents. Based on these results, we provide recommendations for the use of smartphones in language documentation projects.