Boas and Malinowski were both concerned with standards of field research and empirical methods and believed that showing the linguistic sources of their ethnographic descriptions, that is, informants' verbal accounts, was a very important part of an anthropologist's task. Since they did not have the luxury of a machine that could record and then play over and over again what the informant said, transcription meant writing down in a systematic and careful fashion informants' answers to questions regarding traditional knowledge and various aspects of the social organization of their community. The transcription of an actual conversation among native speakers or any other kind of verbal performance at the normal rate of speech was beyond the technological reach of early ethnographers. To capture information about language use, they were forced then to rely on two kinds of techniques. One was to try to catch a word or phrase as it was used in the course of an interaction, make a mental or written note about it, and then wait for an opportunity to ask an informant about it: