Required Reading:

Varenne, Hervé Chapter One in Ambiguous Harmony. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp.. 1992. (pp. 21-52)

1. From
   1. the corpus as "raw" (fieldnotes, tapes, documents, etc.) to
   2. the corpus at it will be revealed in analysis
      1. What do anthropologists: they write -- actually, they keep rewriting

         "The ethnographer 'inscribes' social discourse; he writes it down. In so doing, he turns it from a passing event, which exists only in its own moment of occurence, into an account, which exists in its inscriptions and can be reconsulted." (Geertz 1972: 19)

      2. What do scientists do: they translate -- and they keep doing it until the corpus, or part of it, can say what the scientist wants to say to the particular audience.

         We presented the laboratory as a system of literary inscription, (Latour and Woolgar 2002: 105)

         Rule 3 Since the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Nature's representation, not its consequence, we can never use this consequence, Nature, to explain how and why a controversy has been settled. (Latour 1987: 258)

2. "In other words" (social) scientists trans-scribe:

   that is they keep re-writing their observations and collections of artifacts into other scripts. Thus trans-scription is a core issue in all sciences and thus, of course, in the social sciences in general, and ethnography in particular.

   1. By implication transcription is thus not a mechanical process of transforming the vocal into the written
   2. it has become clear that transcription a process of selection of what to move from one medium (the voice, the movement) to another (the paper, the table, the picture or graphic). This "what" must be determined on theoretical grounds. The very nature of the final representation must be carefully thought out since it will always constitute theoretical choices that should made be explicit (Ochs 1979).
   3. I would expand this into the general task of transforming pages of fieldnotes into a paragraph or two summarizing these pages.
3. A sample of transcription styles

   For example, the following is a set of possible styles of transcription each accomplishing different tasks, from the purely archival (designed to give the researcher a rough handle of what is on a recording in case it is needed for further analysis) to the analytic (designed to summarize graphically the findings of analysis).

   1. With an emphasis on the audio track
      1. Subject content
      2. Rough
      3. Literal
      4. Literal with some paraverbal cues (useful for detailed conversational analysis focusing on interactional patterns between speakers)
      5. Timed, literal with more paraverbal cues (useful to highlight temporal relationships)
      6. Wave form (useful for timing purposes and exact analysis of interpersonal synchronization)
   2. With an emphasis on the video track
      1. Stick drawing of some body stance
      2. Frame grabs with summary of behavior and talk.
         1. from research on childbirth
         2. from research on education in family settings
   3. With an emphasis on textualized observations
      1. for example
         1. from:

            During the third period, I went over to the AV room. Dan Gilstrap was there and he told me that they hide in the AV room from certain people. At one point Joan Gialanella walked by and John Inman said hello to her. He seemed, however, to be trying to hide from her in the room. She then told him that there was going to be an exam tomorrow and he was somewhat annouyed that she had just told him today about an exam tomorrow. He explained to her that he thought this wasn’t fair and that he would not have enough time to prepare properly for it and they sort of ended their conversation in a vague way.

            The following students were in the AV room: Fred Reynolds, Harry Smith, John Inman, Spencer Hardy, Peter Convery, Dan Gillstrap, and Bill Bay Reuther. I just realized that later in the day while speaking with Mr. Lantheir and Mr. Powers, both of them noted that the AV students are a really heterogeneous mix of students, ranging from very smart to not so smart and ranging from freaky type people to more athletic type students.

            While I was talking to the kids in the AV room, they sent Spencer Hardy down to the commons to get food. Ralph Cox then told me that Spencer Hardy is a gopher and that he has to go for this and go for that and especially food. Spencer, although a junior, looks much younger than the rest of the students and seems to serve as the mascot. At one point Spencer came over to look at my notes. He said he didn’t like the fact that I took notes and thought it was a waste of time. He said he didn’t like the idea of doing the study there. The other students basically told him to shut up and leave the rest of us alone. (from fieldnotes)

         2. to:

            One group was well known to have formed in just this way. It was the "Audio-Visual and Stage Crew." William Gregory was a member of this crew and Saario was often seen in the AV roam. It was universally agreed that members of the AV crew were "loners." This made their reality as a clique a matter of dispute among informants. It was agreed that the AV crew was seen consistently together but that they were not together in quite the same way as the freaks were for the jocks, or the jocks for the freaks, or as any speaker's "loose group of friends" can be said to be "together." (Varenne 1982: 255)

4. Further transciptions on the way to models (analytic representations highlighting properties of the event) that:
   1. highlight who participates
   2. highlight who does what
   3. highlight how people mutually organize their bodies