This is a short summary of Jacksons article "Minds and Machines".

1. Jackson. Minds and machines.
If you don´t have an image in your head, it doesn´t matter, what kind of quality camera
you have. Nowadays it’s so easy to make good photos. It’s true that professional equipment
helps and eases to make a good photo. And the technologies are improving fast! Even just one
decade ago it was much more difficult to even carry all this gear around in the fieldworks. Now
we can capture more information than earlier.
(Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. That’s the way, how to learn things. A good mistake
teaches you enough so you understand better what you are doing.)
In fieldwork less is sometimes more – that means you don’t need too much equipment,
because it will just bother and annoy you. You will not be able to operate with them freely. You
need to remember, that you will never get everything anyway. Know what your needs are and
never use more technology then you need.
You don’t need to be a professional photographer or media specialist to work with these
tools, just learn, what is really necessary for doing your work. Later, if you will need in-depth
knowledge for something, you will learn it, when you will need it. But the more you know, the
more possibilities it gives to you, for example, if you know, how to make films and you want to
document a tradition, it’s more likely that you will make a movie about it then you would be if
you knew nothing about making films.
You need to be aware that the more complex your equipment will be, the less attention
you will pay to your informant. But don’t forget that technologies can always disappoint or fail
you. So it’s very important to have always with you a pen and paper. Even if you take huge
amounts of video, you need a pen and paper to mane notes of what you have recorded, so later
you don’t get lost in your huge amounts of recordings.
The interesting thing what machines do is something, what Jackson calls field amnesia.
You don’t remember things so much because you know it’s in your recording and you will find it
whenever you will want, so you kind of let the information go. But the thing is that usually (it
happens for me) you also forget that you have recorded it, so the info is somewhere deep in
your files, but you don’t even remember about it’s existence.
Also serious question is that fieldworker tends to define field situations in terms of the
instruments available. For example, if he has a photo camera in his hands, he will pay attention
on photos, images to catch, while the other information can meanwhile easily slip away. That’s
why the best is that there is a fieldworker team and each has his duty. One is photographer,
other a sound or video recorder, the third one is the talker, the one, who keeps the
conversation going on. It’s very important to have a good team, but it’s also important to have
one director, the leader. Also too big team is disturbing. Many field situations are destroyed
because having too many outsiders.

2. Every time you go in the ‘’field’’, you should ask yourself: “What equipment do I really
need?” and the answer should be based on the fact that as little as you can possibly get away
with. It’s reasonable to focus attention on the factors that influence the information we’re
gathering at any particular time. If we are making audio recording, we should pay attention to
remove all background noise, or if we shoot photos, we should care about the light, but it’s also
reasonable to remind yourself time by time to take a look around at everything else.
If you collect materials you think are really important, contact one of the many archives
in the country and see, if they’ll store your materials under archival conditions and make for
you a duplicate set of everything you can use without risk.