Poetic Transcriptions

Welome to Poetic Transcriptions!

This ethnopoetic game explores the meaning that exists between the words we say, encouraging scholars to reconsider how they construct their research transcripts. This game asks players to construct short story poems using only the words randomly generated by this project website. These words, identified by Berger (1967) and Hipskind and Nerbonne (1970) as among the most common spoken in conversation during their respective fieldwork, are often considered extraneous in Western models of data transcription. Yet such words can be meaningful when considered in the conditions of their speech, whose delivery helps shape how their content comes to be understood. As such, it is our hope that this game will be not just entertaining for its players, but also instructive for their conversations and indeed their future research practices.