okay, time to talk about transcripts

I've had two lots of reviewer feedback this week. One was to do with a journal article (see previous post) and the other was about a chapter for a book. Both pieces of writing draw on my phd work and both employ Jefferson notation to record talk in transcripts. The journal article analyses talk between a teacher and individual students -just short sequences of talk. The chapter involves a longer sequence of talk between students that occurred at table during independent writing. Because there were several students seated at the table I have included all their talk in the transcript. This means that some of the talk, though important to the development of my transcript and overall analysis of independent writing, appears irrelevant to the immediate analysis at hand. That is, there are several conversations going on at the same time, although I am focused on the talk between a couple of students rather than all the talk that occurred. My focus for analysis is represented in the transcript by arrows to indicate the talk that I am addressing, but yes -the transcript is complex.

The editors's feedback has resulted in my immediate need to address the complexity of the transcript. In my thesis I took a position informed by my methodological perspective, although I have not seen any papers that address the issues of developing transcripts as I had to do - representing the talk of numerous students without knowing, beforehand, what would be of interest to my own analysis.

In relation to the feedback on my chapter, I could take out the surrounding talk that appears in the transcript of the talk between two students however the result is largely a linear appearance to the transcript that does not represent the talk that occurred. More importantly, at some stages during independent writing it was obvious that some students used the "surrounding talk" of others. What to leave out or include was a problem that i had to address. I chose to include all talk. This makes for transcripts that are difficult to read but was a better result for me than developing several versions of the same transcript. Matching those up would be a nightmare. So my chapter, uses this transcript.

While I have to attend to the feedback on the chapter I have written, it is clear to me that the issue of developing transcripts that represent multiple participants completing a range of activities is an issue for the field of Conversation Analysis.