Choices in Transcription

As we have been talking in class, I have been bringing my attention to the wealth of audio data I possess. To be honest, I've kind of been purposely avoiding thinking of it because it seems overwhelming. Since June, I have collected 24 recordings of teacher meetings and 13 teacher interviews, each of which are at least an hour long. I've been keeping notes about important quotes and where generally to find them. The idea of transcribing any significant chunk of this data makes me panic a little inside.

So when I saw the title of Johnson's (2010) piece, I got a little excited. Then I read the paper and found out that, while dictation software can help change things up, ti might take even longer than the traditional method. (Incidentally, I found it amusing that he described the process of transcription "dull." For some reason, I thought that people who wrote about this topic ultimately found it stimulating in some way.)

Something else I found compelling was the way Hammersley (2010) described the choices and associated consequences of transcribing different parts of an audio file. I have taken a few courses that discussed transcription, but I didn't get a good sense of what kind of choices a researcher must make in transcription. Hammersley helped me think about the difference between transcribing a long pause or a breath, and I realized that (like many things) the answer is really contextual.

All of the quotes I have transcribed have been for the purpose of illuminating a point or highlighting a change in thinking. These have all been short quotes - small statements to prove that what I said about a teacher was confirmed by them. I've read a fair amount of papers on discourse analysis, and I haven't seen the point of transcribing the pauses, ums, and restarts in speech. Now I'm thinking about that choice and the consequences that go with it. On the one hand, if I "fix" someone's speech so that it is more fluid, the reader does not see the thinking process the speaker went through. On the other hand, leaving the speech in its original form may make the speaker feel vulnerable, and may even get in the way of the reader understanding the point, as typos have a tendency to do.

The choices a researcher makes regarding what to transcribe depend on the context of the argument. Why is this quote being used? What purpose does it serve? How does it move the argument forward? The answers to these questions will vary with every paper, so a researcher must reconsider them every time.

The framing of the move away from foudationalism really helped me think through these points. What kind of research am I doing? What is my broader purpose for conducting this research? We can move beyond the old "gold standard" and illuminate important points through the voices of our participants.