CABank English Jefferson NB Corpus

Gail Jefferson (1938-2008) School of Social Sciences University of California, Irvine website

Johannes Wagner Department of Design and Communication University of Southern Denmark jwa@sdu.dk website

Browsable transcripts

Download transcripts

Media folder

Citation information

Jefferson, G. (2015). Talking about troubles in conversation. Oxford University Press.

In accordance with TalkBank rules, any use of data from this corpus must be accompanied by at least one of the above references.

Project Description

This segment of the Conversation Database is dedicated to the memory of Gail Jefferson.

The original transcripts from Jefferson are available here. Those originals can be downloaded and then played and studied through CLAN, and the media can be downloaded from here .

The versions available through the TalkBank browser for NB were created by modifying symbols in the originals to align with the requirements of CHAT in accord with these guidelines.

NB (aka Newport Beach) is a collection of phone calls collected in the early years of Conversation Analysis. These transcripts have been the focus of much of the seminal work done in CA. NB includes 25 files from more than 30 files in the original data-corpus. All files have been typewriter-transcribed by Gail Jefferson. Several files have been re-transcribed over the years. Gail Jefferson produced four transcriptions (2countryclub, 3assistance, 4matter and 5directions) electronically in autumn 2007.

In 2003 and 2004, Kresten Nyman and Johannes Wagner retyped all of the files into the computer from the typewritten originals. Johannes Wagner is responsible for any errors in the electronic transcripts. Before making the data available, Lone Laursen, Brian MacWhinney and Johannes Wagner anonymized names and addresses. In the sound files, names and other personal information were replaced by silences. In the transcripts, personal names, place names and addresses were replaced by pseudonyms, which are syllabically equivalent to the original. During this process, we retained the various pseudonyms that had already been chosen by Gail Jefferson, while adding many new ones. The data in the NB corpus are numbered to indicate the succession of the calls. However, we do not know how or when the original recordings were made.