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To Transcribe Or Not To TranscribeTranscriptions are useful analytic tools. With this in mind, a detailed transcription of Wicket and Jerome's edited and unedited video was made. It required a great deal of time, and adjustments were necessary in time codes when analysis shifted from using the tapes directly versus within the editing program Final Cut Pro. The manner of transcription was designed with attention to the details necessary for this part of the analysis. After working with this transcription a great deal, it was discovered that the words interfered with seeing the work for what it was. Most concretely, this became evident in the placement of boundaries between events, but more generally the use of the transcription led to a static view of the video project: It became a series of fragmented images with the minute changes from one frame to the next having an augmented meaning. I made additional adjustments to the written document before finally deciding to work directly with the videos and occasionally printing a series of stills to serve as reminders. The problem is that video is done in real time, and while it is extremely useful to be able to move frame by frame or to slow the speed of play, these actions are ultimately distorting. The application of words to a microscopic viewing distorts the video further. Decisions are made, which seem trivial in the moment, about which actions and which objects to note and which words should note them. For example, Wicket, as previously noted, has the image in constant motion. The effort to note each movement leads to ignoring the smallest moves while making slightly larger moves seem bigger and more significant than they were. A perfectly elaborated system of criteria for which to ignore and which to note would only further the bias by making some potentially meaningful movements invisible and some meaningless movements seem significant. A distinction between “pans,” left or right movements in which the movement itself had significance, and “shifts,” left or right movements that acted only as an adjustment to what was included within the frame, was attempted, but the effort to decide which shifts were intentional and which were the result of unsteady hands became impossible. Even writing all the audible speech is a distortion because most of it is imperceivable in normal play, and particularly words, once written down, make a stronger impression than they do in the video. The transcription was finally set aside and all but forgotten. Instead, an ever expanding spreadsheet was used to note basic information such as the breaks between shots and events and various codes that were considered. Although not yet explored in detail, a number of computer programs have been developed that enable multimedia data to be matched with written analysis. Having multiple audio tracks—the original tracks and the narrations students provided—as done in this study would complicate the use of these multimedia programs, but these may facilitate opening the analysis to more people as is the ideal next step. The fact is that the way we experience the “data,” whether as a video played in real time or in slow motion or in some written form, clearly impacts what is perceived and thus necessitates caution and some reference to the source material. |
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