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Notes on Transcription

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The course encourages you to try your hand at a few "experiments" common among ethnopoetic practioners. In terms of teaching Ethnopoetics, the importance of transcription is foremost its relation to listening. As readers with deeply entrenched habits of literacy, we are not only unlikely to produce language that sounds like an "oral" person, but we also are not in the habit of hearing as one.  (We'll leave aside the complex issues raised by Lord, Ong, et al for the moment). Thus my interest in encouraging you to experiment with the making of a transcription (that is a written representation of a spoken event) is to challenge your hearing. As you work at the interface of sound and page, between written and spoken, you may become aware of the discrepancies  or distances between these media. The practice of close-listening (and listening again, for transcription usually involves repetition) changes your level of attention, as does reflection upon what you will or will not transcribe.

What level of detail do you want to record? Are you aiming for a comprehensive transcript or a performable score? Are individual variations of pronunciation, tone of voice, audience response, pacing, out-of-frame comments (e.g. "Is this tape recorder on") worth transcribing? and if so, how?

Here are models and provocations:

Two transcriptions published in Alcheringa/Ethnopoetics, with which you may also compare audio on the site:
 

You might find these selections from Richard Kostelanetz's -TextSoundTexts anthology also interesting. They are more properly scores, in most cases constructed by poets, writers, artists, or musicians themselves; each one implies a method, however, that might be suitable for transcribing performances.

Here are some of my own efforts: Transcription of an Interview: TedlockSherwood-PeopleEitherGoClick.pdf | Other examples adapting the Tedlock method can be found here: Sherwood - Densmore's Ghost: Examining the History and Literarization of an Ethnographic "Text"; and Sherwood - Heft_and_Weft-OnVicuna.

Structural Ethnopoetics - Mary Jane Young's  EthnopoeticRetranslation does not work from a live performance or recording, but rather explains and then demonstrate's how one might represent structural qualities (inherent in the form and grammar of the source)--notably parallelism--visually. (This approach is associated with Dell Hymes, who is mentioned in the Swann introduction and included in Symposium of the Whole.) I call this structural ethnopoetics, because it aims to represent features of the language rather than of specific performances. The issue takes on special importance in terms of genre, and whether archival texts can best be read in our terms as poetry or prose.

I also recommend Elizabeth Fine's The Folklore Text: From Performance to Print as a comprehensive and useful overview; Tedlock's Spoken Word and the Work of Written Interpretation, as an extended argument for textualizing "para-linguistic" features in performance.  Additionally, you may look at Brathwaite's Middle Passage, Evers and Molina's Yaqui Deer Songs, and the whole of many anthologies (including Swann's Coming to Light ) for further examples.