Technological developments have allowed the development of lightweight, wearable recorders that collect audio (including speech) lasting up to a whole day. We provide a general description of the technique and lay out the advantages and drawbacks when using this methodology. Field linguists may gain a uniquely naturalistic viewpoint of language use as people go about their everyday activities. However, due to their duration, noisiness, and likelihood of containing sensitive information, long-form recordings remain difficult to annotate manually. Open-source tools improve reproducibility and ease-of-use for researchers, to which end speech technologists can contribute. Additionally, new approaches to human and automated annotation make the study of speech in longform recordings increasingly feasible and promising.