Were the loosest and freest conversation to be transcribed, there would immediately be observed something which connected it in all its transitions. Or where this is wanting, the person who broke the thread of discourse might still inform you, that there had secretly revolved in his mind a succession of thought, which had gradually led him from the subject of conversation.

Section III of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume

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.