Visual Transcription: A method to analyze the visual and visualize the audible in interaction

Abstract

The communication and language sciences have decidedly taken a multimodal turn and a proliferation of work in previously language-dominated fields is focusing on the contribution of non-verbal communicative modes in social interaction. While this has proven empirically and theoretically fruitful, it throws an additional kink in an already complicated issue: transcription practices and the interpretive and representational process accompanying said practices. In this article, we review and champion a methodological framework that provides analytical tools and a transcription protocol for the generation of visual transcripts. Visual transcription, we contest, is far more congruent with the multimodal ethos and we both detail the method while applying it to a data segment from a larger project investigation teamwork and collaborative problem-solving in dyadic videoconferencing interactions. The analytical focus on action coupled with the accompanying transcription method reveals complex and fluctuating distributions of attention and interactional awareness. Non-verbal actions reveal contributions to the task at hand which are not realized in talk and the analysis details an intricate ebb and flow of attentional orientations which are realized through non-verbal means.