CABank English Jefferson Watergate 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

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.

NOTE: The original Watergate transcripts from Jefferson are available in .cha format here and in MS-Word format here . These transcript cannot be reformatted in accord with CHAT and included in the datbase and the Browsable Database. However, these originals can be downloaded and then played and studied through CLAN, and the media can be downloaded from here .

There are also versions of Watergate conversations available through the TalkBank browser that were created by automatic speech recognition. These versions have nothing to do with the versions created by Gail Jefferson.

WaterGate is a collection of 22 transcripts of telephone conversations between President Richard Nixon and members of his top staff and their lawyers during April 1973, as the prosecution of the Watergate breakup and its subsequent cover-up were being conducted. All of the conversations are telephone calls with the exception of 3-21ndh.cha, which is a conversation recorded in the Oval Office. The National Archives provided the audiotapes; Gail Jefferson produced the transcripts in MS-Word format. Johannes Wagner, Lone Laursen, and Brian MacWhinney then reformatted the transcripts to CHAT heritage format and linked the files to the audio. In addition, Gail Jefferson had created four transcripts (3-21ndh, 4-19ekalm, 4-25nh, and 72-colhunt) using the typewriter. Johannes Wagner and Lone Laursen computerized these directly into CHAT heritage format, so no MS-Word files are available for these four.

• A summary of the symbols Gail used for Watergate is found here .
• A log of the segments of the calls is found here .
• A list of the names of people in the calls and their background is found here.