How to render conversation analysis style transcriptions in LaTeX

UPDATE: I’ve now found there is a better way to do this, which I’ve documented here.

---

A large part of my research is going to involve conversation analysis, which has a rather beautiful transcription style developed by the late Gail Jefferson to indicate pauses, overlaps, and prosodic features of speech in text.

There are a few LaTeX packages out there for transcription, notably Gareth Walker’s ‘convtran’ latex styles. However, they’re not specifically developed for CA-style transcription, and don’t feel flexible enough for the idiosyncracies of many CA practitioners.

So, without knowing a great deal about LaTeX (or CA for that matter), I spent some time working through a transcript from Pomerantz, A. (1984). Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in Conversation Analysis (pp. 57-102). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Here’s a image version from page 78:

Here’s how I figured that in LaTeX:

\begin{table*}[!ht]
\hfill{}
\texttt{
  \begin{tabular}{@{}p{2mm}p{2mm}p{150mm}@{}}
     & D: &  0:h (I k-)= \\
     & A: &  =Dz  that  make any sense  to  you?  \\
     & C: &  Mn mh. I don' even know who she is.  \\
     & A: &  She's that's, the Sister Kerrida, \hspace{.3mm} who, \\
     & D: &  \hspace{76mm}\raisebox{0pt}[0pt][0pt]{ \raisebox{2.5mm}{[}}'hhh  \\
     & D: &  Oh \underline{that's} the one you to:ld me you bou:ght.= \\
     & C: &  \hspace{2mm}\raisebox{0pt}[0pt][0pt]{ \raisebox{2.5mm}{[}} Oh-- \hspace{42mm}\raisebox{0pt}[0pt][0pt]{             \raisebox{2mm}{\lceil}} \\
     & A: &  \hspace{60.2mm}\raisebox{0pt}[0pt][0pt]{ \raisebox{3.1mm}{\lfloor}}\underline{Ye:h} \\
  \end{tabular}
\hfill{}
}
\caption{ Evaluation of a new artwork from (JS:I. -1) \cite[p.78]{Pomerantz1984} .}
\label{ohprefix}
\end{table*}

Here’s the result, which I think is perfectly adequate for my needs, and now I know how to do it, shouldn’t take too long to replicate for other transcriptions:

I had to make a few changes to the document environment to get this to work, including:

• \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

  to make sure that the double dashes — were intrepreted as a long dash while in the texttt environment.

• I also had to do

  \renewcommand{\tablename}{Datum}

  to rename the “Table” to “Datum” – because I’m only using the table for formatting (shades of html positioning 1990’s style).

• \usepackage{caption}

  to suppress caption printing where I wanted the datum printed without a legend (using

  \caption*

  instead of

  \caption

  ).

The above example is designed to break into a full page centre-positioned spread from a two-column article layout, so those directives are probably not relevant to using it in the flow of text or in two-columns, but I found the (texttt) fixed width font (which, because of the evenly spaced letters, seems to make it easier to read the transcription as a timed movement from left to right) was too large to fit into one column without making it unreadably small.

I hope this is useful to someone. If I find a better way of doing this (with matrices and avm as I’ve been advised), I’ll update this post. Any pointers are also much appreciated as I think I’m going to be doing a lot more of this in the next few years.

There are other horrors in here, and it was a really annoying way to spend a day, but this method seems to get me as far as I need to go right now.

Many thanks to Chris Howes for holding my hand through this.