Reflections on Transcribing

Transcribing the ventrilo conversation was somewhat difficult. Some sounds were difficult to correctly portray as typed words. Words like "oof" and "aw" are not exactly correct for the sounds made. I could not capture the difference in laughs. Not all laughs are the same and the intonation of a laugh can mean different things. At one point I used "giggle" instead of "laugh" because I believed it described the laugh better. The person who made the laugh objected to the description and I have since decided that I should have used the word "snicker" to better describe the type of laugh.

The transcription is missing important intonation of the words. A lot of meaning is lost without this intonation. When Aalliyah says, "You abandoned us." She does it in a teasing manner that implies she is not upset. The transcription also looses many of the accents and dialects of the participants. I used the correct spelling for many words instead of writing them as they were spoken phonetically.

Another problem with the transcription is that people who are unfamiliar with the context are not going to understand the conversation. Some of the words used will be unfamiliar. Words such as "rez," short for resurrect and phrases like "mana up"will not be known by most readers. The places and actions referred to will also be unfamiliar. The phrase, "purge his shield," will not make sense to people who are not familiar with the context. The participants even speak of a word in another "language" they do not know the meaning of and explain the meaning to each other.

There is also some deixis that would prevent people from knowing what the speaker is speaking about. Helix makes a deictic reference when he says, "the battle migrated to the other side." Sokila makes a deictic reference when he says, "I got two out front here." They speak of places only someone present would know.

Sometimes it seemed people were fighting to be heard. Part of the problem is that we can not see one another while speaking over ventrilo and so visual clues for turn taking are not present. There is somewhat of a physicality through the virtual world inside the computer but there are still not any facial expressions or body movements to see. If someone does not speak you can not gauge their reaction and timing.

It was difficult transcribing when people spoke over one another. I tried to capture timing with the time stamps but a reader may still miss the importance of this. At some points two different conversations overlap and adjaceny pairs are split by comments that do not fit in with the rest of the conversation.

The participants of the converstaion have multiple names they know each other by and often refer to. I tried to make this easier for the reader by labeling people with the name they were most often called by in the conversation. However, Aalliyah is called Am in the conversation.

Another aspect someone unfamiliar with the group might miss is the relationships between the people and the power structure. This has a great influence on the conversation.

I noticed some unanswered utterances. Grimmel twice makes a statement that no one replies to and then does not speak for the rest of the 5 minutes. There are also many participants to the conversation that speak very little or not at all. There were 10 people on the vent channel when this conversation took place but only 8 spoke.