Transcription Techniques for the Spoken Word

An anthropologist based in New Mexico, Powers is involved in cultural heritage programs, oral history projects, and archives. She examines both conceptual and technical choices that are made—if not carefully, then carelessly—when transcribing speech as part of a research or preservation project. Transcribing methods, she says, need to reflect the specific goals and also the theoretical ideas about language, communication, and exchange that underlie the social sciences. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR