I'm baaaack

I haven't posted in a long while, but I've been lurking. And keeping busy-- some diss work, some teaching, helping out with the UNH conference. It's been a good busy, but not a focused one.

Today, I started moving back into a focused busy-ness. I spent about 2 hours transcribing the focus group video. I'm planning on some Gee-style discourse analysis, so I need a solid-- if not linguistically annotated-- transcript.

Good gravy is transcribing hard. I couldn't type as quickly as the speakers talked, so this motion was common: press play, start typing and listening and remembering ahead as much as possible, press pause, keep typing until caught up. Rinse. Repeat.

It was more sustained typing than I've done in a long time, so my wrists and fingers were clumsy by the end. I had a bit of a headache from looking back and forth from the video (on my laptop) to the word processing screen on the lab computer.

I managed to finish a complete rough transcription. Next: print out the transcript (with triple spacing) and watch the video again, pen in hand, to fill in missing words and make corrections.

While the task was less than fun, I'm enjoying getting back into my data-- it's been a while since I've been in it, and this is the closest I've gotten to the language the participants are using. Some interesting stuff.