I’ve posted my introduction to the Digital Transcription Workshop materials and tutorials online. Here is a short blog describing some of the reasons why I started developing the workshop and how I hope researchers will use it.

There are very few, if any, software tools designed specifically for analytical conversation transcription, in part because very few conversation analysts use them, so there is no real “market” for developers to software can respond.

Instead, we must make do with tools designed for more generic research streams and which often incorporate analytical assumptions, constraints, and visual metaphors that do not necessarily align with EM/CA’s methodological priorities.

However, most researchers using digital transcription systems choose between two main paradigms.

1. The “turn list” system represents the interaction much like a Jeffersonian transcription: a rendering of a conversation turn by turn, line by line, arranged semi-schematically so that overlapping lines of conversation are aligned vertically on the page. .
2. The “timeline levels” system uses a horizontally scrolling timeline as a video editing interface, with multiple layers or “levels” representing, for example, each participant’s speech, embodied actions, and other types of action annotated on the over time.

One of the main uses of both types of digital transcription systems is that they allow researchers to align media and transcription, and use highly precise synchronization tools to verify the order and timing of their analytical observations.

I used these terms to describe this representational schema distinction in a short “expert box” for the excellent book by Alexa Hepburn and Galina Bolden (2017). Transcription for social research entitled “how to choose transcription software for conversation analysis”, where I tried to explain the issues of choosing one or another type of system .

For the most part, researchers choose turn list tools when their analysis focuses on conversation and audible turn space, and timeline levels when their analysis focuses on video analysis of visible bodily actions.

The problem for EM/CA researchers working with these two approaches, however, is that neither the representational schema itself (nor any schema, apart from that which may have been constituted by the original interaction itself), is ideal for exploring and describing participant behaviors. sensemaking processes and resources.

Timeline representations are great for showing the timeline of simultaneous action, but it’s difficult to read more than a few seconds of activity at a glance. In contrast, turn lists use the same basic pattern as our mundane, well-practiced reading skills for skimming a page of text and understanding the overall structure of a conversation, but reduce fine-grained timing and multi-activity organization . of complex embodied activities.

Regardless, neither these representation schemes nor any of the currently available transcription tools adequately capture the dynamics of movement in the way that, for example, specialized graphical methods and drawing techniques do. after nature have been developed (although our prototype drawing interactions indicate some possibilities).

The reason I organized this digital transcription workshop was to combine existing and well-used software tools for digital transcription from the two main paradigms, and to show how to work on a piece of data using both approaches. This is not a comprehensive “solution” and there remain many unresolved practical and conceptual issues, but I think it gives researchers the best chance to address their empirical concerns and help them break away from conceptual and disciplinary constraints that arise from analyzing data using a uniform type of user interface.

The workshop materials include slides (so people can use them to teach collaborators/students) as well as a series of short instructional videos accompanying each practical exercise in the slides, along with some commentary from me.

I hope that researchers will use and improve these materials, and possibly extend them to include additional tools (e.g., the EXMARaLDA project tools, with which I am less familiar). If so and you find ways to improve them with additional tips, hacks, or updated instructions that take into account new versions, let me know.