Transcription as embodied entextualization

Abstract

This article analyzes transcription as a form of knowledge production, distinguishing between the role of transcription as a tool and the contingent nature of transcription as a process. It uses the lens of embodied entextualization, or the culturally specific ways bodies are incorporated into as well as produce texts (Cavanaugh 2017), to illuminate the interdiscursive process of transcription and how it is shaped by social factors such as race, gender, politics, and class. I do so by presenting and analyzing text-objects from my own research on language ideologies and language shift in northern Italy at various stages of entextualization, highlighting the multiple choices that shape transcription and how such choices are in turn shaped by a number of factors often invisible in the final, or at least public, versions of these texts that circulate the most widely. Transcripts such as the ones I discuss endure as evidence, in published and other forms, even as intertextual gaps punctuate their interdiscursive reproduction across instantiations. This work raises questions about the role of transcripts as evidence, their authority, and their varying ontological statuses as text objects in order to further conversations about how scholarship about language in use may be reflexively undertaken.