In Transcribing talk and interaction, Jenks provides a practical guide for students and researchers who are beginning to acquaint themselves with transcribed data and transcription-based research. Drawing on his own experience both as a Conversation Analyst and as a leader of workshops on transcription, the author presents a range of practical, methodological, and theoretical considerations that factor into the creation and use of transcriptions as products and objects of research. In Chs. 1 and 2, Jenks situates and provides a theoretical backdrop for transcripts and transcription. He discusses the ways different researchers may use transcripts, identifying their essential academic utility as secondary products that are derivative of recorded audiovisual data, but still in some way reflective of their sources. In his consideration of the theoretical issues, the author clearly outlines the basic questions a researcher must deal with before launching into transcribing, like the appropriate level of granularity, the representation of nonstandard speech, and the protection of participants in the recordings.

Chs. 3–5 constitute the bulk of the guide, in which Jenks moves beyond the what and why of transcription to questions about how to transcribe. This practical overview begins in Ch. 3 with an outline of the sorts of technical issues involved in converting recordings to text, and includes guidance on hardware/software needs as well as advice about the organization, usability, and readability of a transcript. Ch. 4 is devoted to the notational representation of interactional and paralinguistic features. The author explains why a researcher might want to transcribe interactional phenomena like turn-taking and overlap, and paralinguistic features like intonation and voice quality. He also presents the conventionalized ways researchers have represented such phenomena in text, contrasting the notational traditions of conversation analysis, discourse transcription, and Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem. The focus of Ch. 5 is nonlinguistic communicative behaviors like gesture, facial expression, and other embodied conduct. Jenks reviews different methods for the embedding of dynamic human forms of communication within the static medium of a transcript, and comments on the consequences of different transcription media (drawings, stills, etc.) and different representations of sequentiality (time stamps, sequencing stills, etc.) for delineating the unfolding of bodily action.

The book closes with a chapter on advanced theoretical and practical issues, in which the author offers additional remarks on the researcher's intimacy with a given project, transcript notations, and transcription software. Finally, the appendix provides a “quick start” guide intended to allow students and instructors to follow a set of guidelines for transcribing. Transcribing talk and interaction is a coherent and well-structured text that would benefit a course or workshop on the subject. Besides detailing numerous aspects of the nuts and bolts of transcription, Jenks also imparts basic guiding principles for the novice transcriber. In doing so, he not only provides the necessary tools and motivation for transcription, but also gives the researcher considerable latitude to use these tools for her own research agenda. Overall, Jenks' treatment of transcription theory and practice is a welcome introduction for the uninitiated to transcript-based research.