Transcription

minutes and 14 seconds. Additionally, photographs of the students’

storyboard, sketches, drawings, and synopsis are also included to support the analysis, but are not analysed specifically.

In the following section I will describe and elaborate on the different steps in the process of analysis. Initially, I describe and elaborate on the transcriptions of the students’ digital video and of the transcription of the video recorded material, after which I describe and elaborate on how I approached the two different types of material in the process of analysis: the analysis of the video recordings and the analysis of the students’ digital video.

Transcription of video recordings

Video recording of students in a classroom is a rich material that can be studied from a variety of perspectives. Faced with a large amount of rich video recorded material, I developed criteria for what to transcribe for further close examination. The theoretical framework and the purpose of the study guided me to develop two criteria: 1) events involving discussions about the poem and how it was interpreted, revised, and elaborated upon; and 2) events incorporating negotiations of the use of semiotic resources. These two criteria were focused on the scope of the study but at the same time open enough not to rule out relevant data. During the analytical process I realised that these two criteria were closely interconnected.

The transcriptions of the video recordings are primarily based on verbal language, including temporal information such as pauses and overlapping talk as well as features such as accentuated words or obvious laughter. The approach for transcription resembles the manifest content approach (Erickson, 2006), which means that focus is on content-related discussions regarding the students’ meaning-making and representation during a transmediation process from poem to digital video. The transcriptions follow the spoken language verbatim, but sometimes punctuation marks are included to support the reading (see Appendix 4 for transcription symbols). The original transcripts are, naturally, in Swedish, but in the translation to English the colloquial language is replaced by written language.²⁷ The reasons for this are to facilitate the reading of the excerpts. All transcriptions are done in the software program Transana,²⁸ which is an application for transcription and analysis of audio-visual material (see Appendix 5a for a screen shot of Transana and the transcription of the video documentation). Because of the theoretical framework of the study, other semiotic resources are also noted in the transcription that are of interest for the focus of the study. Such notations include, for

27 I have only translated the transcripts that are included as excerpts in the presentation of findings in Chapter 5. All other trancripts are in Swedish.

28 Information about Transana can be found on www.transana.org.

example, obvious gestures while filming or pointing at something of importance on the screen during the editing phase.

It may seem contradictory to focus largely on the students’ talk in a study that puts emphasis on multiple means of meaning-making, and which theoretically and methodologically applies a multimodal approach. But because of the need to limit the objects of analysis I have chosen to focus on the students’ talk about their multimodal designing to get an insight into the choices made during the transmediation process. Their talk is considered as a mode in understanding the students’ meaning-making, not the mode. It is also questionable whether it is possible, or even desirable, to include every semiotic resource in transcription and analysis. The focus of the study is what determines what is transcribed. The students’ talk during the designing process provides me with the possibility of following their choices and negotiations regarding their interpretation and representation.

Transcription of students’ digital video

For transcription of the students’ digital video I developed a transcription system based on the kineikonic mode (Burn & Parker, 2001; 2003; Burn, 2013) with inspiration from the way Halverson, Bass, and Woods (2012; see also Halverson, 2010) apply the kineikonic mode in their analysis of youth films as representation of identity. The kineikonic mode is used to describe the moving image as a multimodal form, acknowledging all the different modes combined in film. The point is not to decompose semiotic modes into smaller elements,²⁹ although Burn (2013) recognises that this might be a valuable analytical path for some researchers.

The transcription system is structured around the two central representational systems within the kineikonic mode: filming and editing (see Figure 1). The transcription is meant to attend to both

29 See Burn (2013, p. 8) for examples of different levels of decomposing semiotic modes into smaller elements.

the content and form of the students’ digital video, not to decompose it into small analytic elements to analyse in detail. Based on the interest of the study, I found that by approaching the digital video from the two representational systems of filming and editing, the interplay of the semiotic resources was more relevant than the decomposing of smaller elements. That is indeed the very focus of the multimodal approach: the way that different modes interact with one another and what is created as a result of their interaction (Burn &

Parker, 2003; Jewitt, Bezemer & O’Halloran, 2016; Kress, 2003; 2010).

This analytical choice makes it possible to attend the students’ digital video openly without locating modes made up beforehand.

In the transcript filming I note resources possible in the filming phase, for example, camera movement, camera angles, length of shot, audio (such as dialogue or sounds occurring during the filming phase), cuts, settings, actors, and the action taking place. In the category editing I note resources possible in the editing phase, for example, audio (such as music, voice-over or sound effects), written text, transitions, and special effects (such as slow motion or freeze-frame). Researchers have attended the transcription and analysis of youth-produced digital videomaking with somewhat different terms (see e.g. Burn, 2013; Halverson, 2010; Halverson, Bass & Woods, 2012; Mills, 2011b) but the attention on the resources of the kineikonic mode is ultimately the same: to acknowledge the resources distinct for the medium of film – or moving image in a broad sense – and finding a way to analyse them.³⁰

30 Halverson’s (2010) use of mise en scène, sound, editing, and cinematography are also acknowledged in the transcription system developed in this study. Mise en scène and cinematography are incorporated in the transcription of filming and the editing is noted in the trancription of editing. However, in the transcription system that I have developed, sound is incorporated in both the filming and editing, since it might appear either as a dialog or a knock on a door during filming, or as voice-over or sound effect during editing. Likewise, the four categories that Mills (2011b) has created for the analysis of features of claymation movies in kineikonic design – screen elements, spatiotemporal elements, technical conventions, and multimodal compositional meanings – for the most part incorporate the same resources for meaning-making as in the transcription system developed for this study.

F IL M IN G E D I T I N G

Resources such as:

• camera movement and angles

• length of shot

• settings

• actors and action

• audio

Resources such as:

• audio

• written text

• transitions

• special effects (e.g. slow motion, freeze-frame)

Figure 1. Description of the transcription system of the students’ digital video based on the kineikonic mode developed by Burn and Parker (Burn, 2013; Burn

& Parker, 2001; 2003).

The transcription of the digital video was made in Transana (see Appendix 5b for a screen shot of Transana and the transcription of the students’ digital video) because of the possibility of using multiple and simultaneous transcripts for a single media file, which serves the multimodal transcription and analysis well. Transana also allows me to analyse them as films, instead of extracting individual images and creating text-based transcripts (see also Halverson, 2010, p. 2365).

The interrelating of the processes of transcription and analysis was especially evident in the processing of the students’ digital video. The process of “translating” the digital video into written language consists of multiple choices, which require a constant attention to the focus and theoretical approach of the study (see Flewitt et al., 2009).

Once the transcriptions of the video recordings and the students’

digital video were made, the process of analysis proceeded to the next step, which involved carefully examining the transcripts for noticeable patterns (as in any qualitative study). This step will be further elaborated in the next section.