The transcript provides a 'thick descriptive' multimodal account of the video data.
There are different ways of organising multimodal transcripts. Transcripts can be in
the form of ‘play scripts’ where all the modes are merged and described in writing.
Moving away from a focus on written transcripts multimodal transcripts can attempt
to represent an event via a series of images, such as stills from video recordings, in
which what is said is presented along side an image of the event (Norris, 2002).
However, while such transcripts present a visual snap-shot of an event the modal
affordance of still image means that it is difficult to capture the detail of gesture and
movement over time and to provide an ‘analytical description’ of an event. An
alternative form of transcribing is analogous with the format of a musical score in
which time runs from left to right and each of the modes is described along this
horizontal time line, each mode occupies a row of the ‘score’. This format introduces
the useful visual analogy of the ‘orchestration of modes’, and the ‘rise’ and ‘fall’
(foregrounding and backgrounding) of specific modes in the multimodal ensemble. A
third option is to organise the modes in separate columns, with time as an anchor.
In order to analyse the data I transcribed it by attending to each of the modes in
separate columns. This separation of modes in the transcript is useful to address the
question of how different modes contribute to computer mediated learning. It enables
the analysis to focus on each mode in turn. The use of time as an anchor in the
transcripts enables the analysis of how different modes interact at a specific moments
in time by reading across the columns. For analytical purposes I used these
multimodal transcripts to record the interaction of students with the screen as shown
in figure 3.1.1 also used this way of transcribing to analyse the resources ‘on screen’
(as in figure 4.3 in Chapter Four). In a sense this latter transcript (Figure 4.3) is a
detail of the transcript shown in figure 3.1. The transcripts allow a different focus on
computer mediated learning. The transcript detailing student interaction with the
computer screen shows their actualization of the potentials of the CD-ROM their
making of the text by their movement through it. The transcript detailing the
resources of the CD-ROM shows the semiotic potentials that the CD-ROM makes
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