Tape and transcript

During my PhD work I spent several months developing one transcript that was used, together with a video recording, for my study of the social organization of independent writing in an early years classroom. During those months i worked between audio recordings and video recordings of the same classroom lesson. It sounds complex but was a consequence of difficulties getting clear recordings on the classroom. To make sure I "got sound" i used three recording devices in all. It was particularly difficult to hear voices on the video recording.

As well as these technical aspects, there were many reasons for moving between transcripts and recordings during the development of the final transcript that I used in my study. I added in most of the non-verbal actions, for example, as I was analyzing sequences. The reason for this? It appeared impossible to select those actions that were relevant (out of all those that were occurring) until I began to analyse what appeared to be of relevance to students and to the teacher.

It was fascinating work and I consequently wrote a section about developing the transcript in my thesis. I found the following article interesting when I came across it this evening.

Innocence and Nostalgia in Conversation Analysis: The Dynamic Relations of Tape and Transcript

Great title! The authors are Malcolm Ashmore and Darren Reed.