Abstract
In this article I examine a collaborative transcription activity between an American linguistic anthropologist and her two French consultants. Transcription is analyzed here as a discursive process between the three co-transcribers that shapes a locally and interactionally produced document: the scription. Instead of examining the transcription as a product, the tradition in the literature, I focus on the process that produces the scription as text. I show how the co-transcribers' verbalizations of their choices enable us to understand how a scription is constructed from and around layers of authorships and conflictive authorities. I argue that a transcription process should be conceived of as a chain of embedded activities (viz., listening, reading, video watching, and writing). I show how these activities unfold sequentially, each of them providing a (re)contextualizing frame for the next. I submit that a transcription is a complex process of entextualizations spread over several points in time, whereas a scription mediates further entextualizations through its own circulation.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
