This is a picture of the foot pedal I use; I currently have two of these because I wanted to be able to work at school/work and at home - and it is a heavy object to carry in your backpack when you bicycle (which I do not do nearly as much as I would like). It connects via a USB cord. I have listened to my tape selection several more times and added some additional paralinguistic elements to the transcript. The file (docx) is available for download after the break. I have continued to rely on Jenks's "Transcribing talk and interaction" (2011; John Benjamins publishing) as a resource. After considering the three conventions he cites - conversation analysis (CA, the 'Jeffersonian' style), Santa Barbara School (SBS) and Gesprächanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2 (GAT) - I have decided to lean toward CA because it frequently uses symbols rather than additional letters in some of the instances. I think that symbols will make this easier to read than letters/abbreviations. I have to say that I personally sometimes find detailed transcriptions very difficult to read and cluttered in appearance. I am adding four things in this 'layer.' (I expect to continue to add detail one or two more times). I added word emphasis, which is done in CA using an underline; faster tempo, which uses > < on the outsides of the faster passages (Jenks notes that you can also use > > but i like the in and out better); and drawn out words, denoted by : One place I differed from CA (and the other two conventions) which was in using periods rather than timing in tenths of seconds for pauses. I did this in part due to the difficulty of counting the pauses accurately. This level of accuracy is not critical for this exercise; it may be for some circumstances but I am not certain that it will ever be significant for the type of work I want to do to time pauses in speech in tenths of seconds. I guess I'll figure that out over time. I would have, but did not use any > < for slower passages because I did not discern any. I have this recording in Olympus Sonority software, in F5, and as an Audacity file. I saved the Audacity file as an MP4 and loaded it in the first transcription program I learned to use, ExpressScribe. Since I had already disabled the 'smart' timing, there was little point in using F5; also I have a little more flexibility with Word than with a text file. Either F5 or ExpressScribe works with my foot pedal. I listened at 85% of real time. I did emphasis during the first listen; speed during the second; drawn out and pauses during the next. I made minimal other changes during each listen (uhs for ums, and took out/added some articles) so this is also a more accurate transcript. Listening for these things was very hard. According to Jenks, it takes some training and practice to be able to distinguish up from down intonations. I do hear a lot of breathing and breaths in this tape. One helpful thing is that I seem to speed up in the 'parenthetical,' explanatory, or descriptive phrases. I also pause sometimes where there would be commas in written text. I tried some of this with my eyes closed so I could focus on the sounds. I am not certain if that was better or not. I am very pleased to be working with a 3 minute (not longer) segment. I have to say that the recording quality of both the the Olympus voice recorders I own - the DM 420 and my newer DM 620 is phenomenal. I am basing this mostly on my past with recording devices and not so much on comparison among the state of the art devices available now (check out the audio comparisons on Audiotranskription.de to hear many recorders). I continue to be excited and amazed about how much can be done with so little expense and small devices.You can buy a 4 or 8 track 'home studio' recorder now for a fraction of the price of what it cost in the 80s or 90s. My earliest recorder was a cassette recorder that was mostly plastic, fairly heavy, so barely portable, about 5 by 8 inches and had a plug in microphone (my older brother had a reel-to-reel). The improvements in technology make detailed transcription a lot more accessible to people. Below is the file in its current state; I will post another 'layer' soon.
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AuthorI am Sheryl L. Chatfield, Ph.D, C.T.R.S. I am a member of the faculty in the College of Public Health at Kent State University. I also Co-coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research and I am a member of the Design Innovation Team at Kent State. Archives
February 2024
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