Documenting Talk

Undergraduate / Graduate

This methods course focuses on the recording, transcription, and coding of talk. We will explore different ways of recording and documenting the contents of talk, focus on the link between transcription production and analysis, discuss the role of the transcriber in the research process, and consider best practices for quality control, process documentation, metadata creation, and archival. Depending on student interest, we will also touch on automated annotation tools and corpus analysis methods. Students are encouraged-but not required-to join with a source recording (or more than one) that they would like to work on. Such recordings might include ethnographic interviews, spontaneous conversation between friends or family members, rehearsed performances, or anything involving talk that should be transcribed or annotated in some way.