The fetishism of transcription: When the text loses its analogical language

Abstract

The Marxist concept of fetishism helps us to understand how liberal regimes, both productive and consumptive, construct a world of circulating objects that appear divorced from the contexts in which they are produced. The same can be said of transcription when it is outsourced and consumed as a primary data by research groups. The importance of transcription in the research process is discussed in the article. First, we take into account its relevance in the analytical process and as part of the methodological concerns to avoid the loss of continuity in the transformation of orality into a primary document. We analyze the problems derived from commercialization of the transcription in the contexts of outsourcing of the field work. Secondly, the work of transcription is contextualized in the artisanal process of qualitative research and it focuses on the possibilities it offers to carry out a continuous analysis in the research process. Finally, the article discusses the ethical dimension of the literal transcription as a process through which we return the people that offered they time and they word to the research in the form of listening.