Rethinking Speech as Text: The Art of Transcribing Speech Data

My name is Alexus Brown, and I am a third-year doctoral student in the University of Pittsburgh’s Linguistics department with a concentration in Sociolinguistics. The digital technological age has contributed state-of-the-art research tools to many fields of study. There are constantly new improvements to Humanities research, especially when it comes to data collection as well as information and knowledge dissemination. Therefore, it is natural that any course on research methodology currently being taught in the Humanities should incorporate elements of digital methodology, such as for data collection and analytical processing. I am passionate about advancing my skills in the field of Linguistics and that begins with being taught and teaching others to perform digital scholarship and utilize digital methodologies properly.

My module Rethinking Speech as Text: The Art of Transcribing Speech Data is for the course, Linguistic Variation and Change, LING 1269, taught by Dr. Dan Villarreal in Fall 2021. Linguistic Variation and Change teaches Linguistics majors how to carry out research in a critical subfield of Linguistics. This module will contribute to modernizing the methods that are taught in this course. This module will also enhance student engagement by using the Pittsburgh Speech and Society Project conversational interviews, a collection hosted by the Pitt Library. These audio recordings will be used for student assessment through creating transcriptions of their chosen recording excerpts on ELAN, an annotation tool for audio and video recordings. The data is already curated and hosted by the University of Pittsburgh’s Library at http://pittsburghspeech.pitt.edu/PittsburghSpeech_Interviews.html

This collections-based module would be truly beneficial to help modernize the existing Linguistic Variation and Change course by introducing students to a state-of-the-art tool for digital methodology. Experience shows that while students enjoy learning about language variation in general, they find the course material more accessible and engaging when it is about their communities. Students who successfully complete this module will be able to: describe the different types of transcription conventions and what methodological purposes the different conventions serve; and apply understanding of those conventions and purposes to transcribe real-world speech data from the Pittsburgh Speech and Society Project through the ELAN program. In Linguistics, there are a multitude of conventions to transcribe data that serve different analytic purposes and for anyone who wants to work with speech data, one needs to learn what it means to transcribe in such a way to serve their unique research purposes.

My collaborative meetings with Dr. Villarreal have been very productive, informative, and helpful for my development as an instructor, as a whole. While I do have previous experience with creating my own lessons and assessments from my experience as a Graduate Teaching Associate, this experience will allow me to advance my skills in curricular development by learning how to use backward design from Dr. Villarreal. This experience will also expand my tools and strategies for teaching beyond lecturing on conceptual information to helping students using hands-on techniques. Dr. Villarreal and I have had planning meetings and I have been most surprised with how much actually goes into the Backward Design model. I have been learning about what makes well-formed objectives and assessments that are well-aligned with those objectives. This learning process has been very enlightening on what goes into lesson planning as a whole. Being a Black queer woman who believes in the importance of communication and proper representation of thoughts, beliefs, and ideas, I intend to teach students how to value speech data and transcribe it accurately to serve their particular research purposes.

 
Alexus Brown
Linguistics
July 2021
 
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