on the tropic of capricorn
now, can I find it in myself to write another journal article before we break for xmas? I've been giving it some thought and I think i'd really like to have a go at writing about transcription. It would draw on a section of my thesis where I considered issues around developing my transcript. This was based on notes that i kept (intuitively?) as I went about the process. I had the feeling at the very start that i was making decisions about what to include and what to leave out, and I sensed that if I didn't keep a record then I would probably forget a lot of my decisions made along the way (although they were important ones, it seemed at the time). so, I wrote notes as I went and usually cited examples from the transcript in-progress to illustrate decisions made, issues that loomed, and so on. This resulted in a document that i was able to categorize according to the issues/decisions I made and was used to write the section in my thesis that addressed transcription. In hindsight, this was a valuable learning experience, in relation to something that will probably always be central to my work as a researcher. It also helped to "open up" the transcription process as an aspect of my research.
so, I'm interested when people make light of transcription (for what that tells), and particularly interested when people make a lot of it. This morning I read a very informative article about transcription:
Lapadat, J. C. & Lindsay, A. C. (1999). Transcription in research and practice: From stadardization of technique to interpretive positionings. Qualitative Inquiry, 5, 64 - 86.
This article is a conceptual review with a very useful list of references. It's a must read for researchers working with transcripts that represent talk and interaction.
posted by christinA @ 8:43 PM
2 Comments:
Interested to know what you mean by "when people make light of transcription (for what that tells)" . . . About the process? the methodology? the researcher?
When I made the post i had in mind some recent experiences of transcription within research projects that i had examined. Your comment serves to make me elaborate, for better or worse.
Recently a researcher remarked to me that she was getting her data transcribed and just wanted to get on with the research. I thought that pretty naive, in the sense that she had provided no guidelines for the transcription and obviously hadn't thought about what decisions might be involved in the transcription process. Or that transcription was a part of research.
At the level of methodology, research that examines spoken texts suggests implications for what is recorded in transcripts. So, a study that considers lingustic development of children would attend to detail that needs to be outlined for the person doing transcription.
The bottom line is that the transcript needs to provide the detail that allows for analysis and is consistent with the methodological approach. In other words, you can't seek to find what isn't represented in the transcript.
At the same time, the recording is the data. So a transcript presents a step removed from the data, not the data itself.
Bottom line, I guess, transcription and transcripts are not to be easily dismissed. So I blanch when I hear someone say that they need to have someone do the trancript so they can get on with their research.
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