______________________________________________________________
1. What program should I use?
Once you have decided what to transcribe and you have prepared your media files (see previous section), there are several different programs available for transcribing audio-visual data. Of these, the most commonly used programs by members of our research community are: CLAN (free), ELAN (free) and Transana (about 60€). Other Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS) packages, such as Nvivo or Atlas.ti also include transcription functions, although they also allow you to import transcripts produced using other programs.
In this tutorial we only include instructions for getting started with CLAN (for now). The main reasons we have chosen CLAN over ELAN or Transana are:
1. It’s free.
2. It is used by a large number of people in our research community, particular among European based researchers working on social interaction.
3. You transcribe turns vertically, one below the other, which is easier to understand if you are getting started. This is also the case in Transana. In ELAN, turns are transcribed horizontally, one next to the other, which takes some getting used to.
4. Using your transcript once it’s done is easy. You can simply copy and paste. This is also the case in Transana. In ELAN, you need to export your transcript which can lead to some formatting problems.
Note that the same process followed for annotating your file in ELAN (see PREPARING FOR TRANSCRIPTION) can be followed to produce a full transcript. However, if you choose this option, when exporting the file when done, select File → Export as → Traditional transcription text.
2. The very basics of transcription with CLAN
The user manuals available for CLAN (see the resources section) can be daunting if you are just starting out. Hopefully these instructions can help you take the very first steps.
GET TO IT: Transcribing in CLAN
2. The first thing you need to do is to tell the program where the data is that you would like to transcribe and where you would like the transcript to be saved. This is what the program calls working. Remember to keep all related files (video, audio, ELAN files, CLAN files, etc.) within the same folder.
3. In the editor, which looks like a standard word processor, you need to introduce commands such as those below before you start the transcription. These are instructions to help the program understand everything you type in later (i.e. your transcript):
@Begin
|
You always start like this
|
@Languages: eng
|
In this case, we are telling the program that the media file is in English (eng). If you have Catalan, Spanish, etc. you can also indicate it (cat, esp..). You can leave this part out, but it might be useful for analyses later.
|
@Participants: MAR Maria, JOR Jordi, SSS Students, XXX Unidentified, PPP Pause
|
Assign pseudonyms to all the participants in your data. You can add to this later, but you will need to then select Tiers → Update (see below). Remember to include pauses as a participant!
|
@Options: jefferson
|
Here you tell the program which transcription system you are using (e.g. Jefferson, CA..., see the section about this below). You can leave this part out, but it might be useful for analyses later.
|
@Media: test2, video
|
‘test2’ is the name of the file, in this case a video file, that is being transcribed. Here you put the name of your file. If we had an audio file, we would write ‘@Media: test2, audio’.
|
4. Save the file in the same place as the media you are transcribing (i.e. working).
5. Click on Tiers → Update. That way, the program assigns a combination of keys to each participant, which will save us time while transcribing.
6. Go to Mode, and select the option Sonic mode. A video player opens up and a soundwave is created. The soundwave will help you enormously as you transcribe.
7. To start transcribing, select a part of the soundwave by clicking down on your mouse button and dragging the cursor. You can normally tell by the soundwave when someone is talking or not. The selected section will play automatically. If you want to listen to the selected section again, click ctrl+mouse click (Windows) or cmd+mouse click (Mac). If you want to change the selection, click and drag our mouse again.
8. Tell the program whose turn it is that you want to transcribe (i.e. who was talking) by using the combination of keys that were assigned in step 5 (ctrl+1, ctrl+2, ... in Windows; cmd+1, cmd+2, ... in Mac).
9. Type in what you hear, as though you were typing in a standard word processor, without using any punctuation signs, capital letters, etc. (see the section on transcription conventions below).
10. After you transcribe your selected section, you need to associate what you have written (transcript) to the precise point it occurs at in the audio and visual data. This is done by inserting a bullet, by clicking crtl+i (Windows) or cmd+i (Mac).
11. We also transcribe silence in exactly the same way as we transcribe speech, but by selecting the section of the soundwave where nobody is speaking. We set the ‘participant’ as pause/PPP by using the corresponding combination of keys. Calculate the duration of the pause by clicking on the black bar with the date:
So that it looks like this:
‘W’ is the duration of the fragment you see on your window at present. ‘C’ is the temporal location of the cursor. ‘D’ is the duration of the current selection, which in this case, is the duration of the pause. Round it to the nearest tenth of a second. If the pause is less than 0.2 seconds, we normally mark it as a minimum silence (see transcription conventions) as it is impossible to be so precise. Your transcription should now look something like this:
12. Continue with the rest of the transcript. Once it is finished, you need to tell the program. Do it by writing the following on a new line:
@End
13. When you finish, to listen to what you have transcribed and make the changes you want, click F5 (the highlighting over the text doesn’t move) or F6 (you can follow your transcription more easily as the highlighting moves down the text in synch with the audio and video data).
TRANSCRIPTION SYMBOLS
After completing an initial, rough transcription, you need to go back and add symbols to best represent your multimodal data in text form. In Conversation Analysis (CA), the most standard conventions are those developed by Gail Jefferson (e.g. 2004, see reference in the resource section).
When adding symbols to your transcript, you need to think carefully about the level of detail you want to include, including whether you will add symbols to represent multimodal and plurilingual phenomena. The tutorials by Antaki (2002) and Schegloff (n.d.), as well as the articles by Mondada(2008) and Nussbaum (2006, see reference in the resource section), should help you make some decisions in this regard.
RESOURCES
CLAN program and manual (Windows and Mac, free)
ELAN program and manual (Windows and Mac, free)
Transana program and manual (Windows and Mac, approximately €60)
2. The very basics of transcription with CLAN
Introductory article about using CLAN:
MacWhinney, Brian & Wagner, Johannes (2010). Transcribing, searching and data sharing: The CLAN softwareand the TalkBank data repository. Gesprächsforschung - Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion, 11, 154-173.
3. Transcription symbols
Introduction to CA transcription symbols:
Jefferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In: Lerner, G. H. (ed.), Conversation Analysis: Studies from the first generation (pp. 13-23). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Introductory transcription tutorial using CA conventions:
Schegloff, Emanuel, A. (n.d.) Transcription module.
Introductory transcription tutorial using CA conventions:
Antaki, Charles (2002). An introductory tutorial in Conversation Analysis.
If you use this option, use the command... @Options: jefferson
...if you want to use CLAN for analyses (see following section) later.
Check here to see modifications of CA symbols for CLAN.
If you use this option, remember to use the command... @Options: CA
...if you want to use CLAN for analyses (see following section) later.
Article about transcribing plurilingual data:
Nussbaum, L. (2006) La transcripción de la interacción en contextos de contacto y de aprendizaje de lenguas. In Y. Bürki & E. de Stefani (eds.) Trascrivere la lingua. Transcribir la lengua. Berna: Peter Lang, 195-218.
Article about transcribing multimodal data:
Mondada, L. (2008). Using video for a sequential and multimodal analysis of social interaction: Videotaping institutional telephone calls. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 9 (3).