Teasing Transcription: Iterations in the Liminal Space Between Voice and Text

Abstract

These pieces of writing and the corresponding collection of objects were born out of what was supposed to be a traditional qualitative research project. At the transcription stage, I got caught. Tied up. I couldn’t make what I was supposed to be making, so this was made instead. Through technological, material, poetic, and artistic shifts, I considered what it might mean to transform an interview from conversation, to sound bite, to various versions of 0000s and 1111s, and perhaps back again. Ten re/presentations of a single interview were created. From these re/presentations, I considered how validity and reliability privilege cold and static representations and how other versions (some of which were also cold, if not static) might work to disrupt our notions of re/search and re/presentation. And, then I wondered how/why all this might come to matter.