Blackwell Reference Online

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Transcribing is the process of representing, in written form, some stretch of lived activity. The resulting transcription provides a document that is easily perused and examined, and in a variety of institutional settings it serves as the official record of the actual proceedings. Such governmental and commercial transcripts are generally perceived as impersonal or unbiased renderings and are intended primarily as references to activity. In communication research, however, it is understood that transcribing is an analytic process , since, in actuality, a transcriber is always selecting and distilling the complexities of speech and action. Or, in the case of rendering original handwritten documents, the researcher loses the artistry of the hand that produced the original document. Transcripts are, therefore, abstract versions of verbal, vocal, bodily, and spatial activities; they embody the transcriber's stance toward the aims of recording and studying a communication event. While researchers who study naturally occurring interaction can agree on the need to represent the participants' talk and action as carefully as possible, choices of what and how to transcribe are driven by philosophical, theoretical, and methodological orientations to the materials being handled ( Ochs 1979 ). For example, if the researcher is concerned primarily with the thematic content of a narrative – with ... log in or subscribe to read full text