ABSTRACT
The use of transcripts of talk and activity recorded in naturally occurring, routine classroom events and other settings such as homes and workplaces has become an important empirical and analytical resource in recent literacy research. This reflects the interests of many researchers in working from the data of everyday events as a basis for describing, explaining or theorizing how literacy activities are observably organized and accomplished by participants. Working with transcripts allows for claims and counterclaims about activities and practices to be referred to a permanent set of reanalyzable records. The analyses and theoretical claims that are produced on the basis of recordings and their associated transcripts are accountable to what other readers, viewers or listeners can see or hear for themselves in these records. Further, recordings and transcripts have the potential to generate multiple and possibly competing analyses and thus to make possible resistance to singular interpretations.
