Breadth & Depth Both

The Video catalog lists some 300 half hour video tapes that have been split up into context focused video clips capturing Peggys developing activity of six years. The number of short clips is more than a thousand. These are supplemented by some 770 short texts of parental notes, which petered out at the beginning of the fifth year.

The initiative of IPS25 is undertaking the Variable Depth Transcription of the first three years of the corpus (with eyes on the remainder of the corpus as well). The Videos Clips of the those three years have been uploaded into panels from P018 through P0157; the frequency of recordings was weekly, with exceptions for equipment malfunction or other major disruptions. Let the separation of the VHS videos into digital clips installed into weekly panels be ground zero. (The panel videos are presented in windows of 240×320 pixels free of text). Further depths are accessed within the “Clip Notes” accessed via links by Clip ID from either the panels’ tables of contents or the same Clip IDs appearing underneath the panels’ panes.

Within the Clip Notes, videos are presented in 480×640 pixel windows. Transcription of videos’ speech from audio to text is a deepening of the material to provide improved access, clarity of content and embedded interpretation. The ongoing development of transcripts uses the services of the HappyScribe.com facility for original text drafts. These drafts are extensively modified by the NLCSA Analyst (Robert W. Lawler). Today’s Analyst was the video participant-director “Bob” some 45 years ago. Memory now serves to specify details, provide context and introduce elements of interpretation that may be corrected, disputed or falsified by others originally participating in the video sessions. This is especcially important with respect to the infant Peggy and the interpretation of her actions, activities and more general behavior. The HappyScribe automatic transcriptions are further specified (as to speaker identity), edited to fix errors ( in the automatic transcript) and expanded (to include motor and pre-language linguitic behavior of the infant Peggy) by the Analyst. This augmented transcript is then presented in episodes as script-like dialogues with embedded actions. The augmented transcript is also installed as supertitle text in new renderings of the video clips.

The preceding process is intended to “unpack” the content of the video clips at levels of personal action and of social interaction. This is essential to explore the development of the infant Peggy, but further depth is needed to approach the discriminations involved in tracing sensory, motor, and pre-language linguistic activity. The first approach to this deeper level of documentation, seen now in the “Action Traces” of three clips, P018C1, P018C2, and P018C3 approaches multi-component activity sequences. The aim is to explore both manifest coordination of different systems (oral, manual, capital, visual) and the lack of coordinations which would be natural at different times or possibly in different circumstances.

We intend also to explore the coordinations of the pre-language linguistic oral, aural systems and the social context with comparable detail where the activities of the parties permit. This is a current frontier challenge. We expect to find interesting material in clips such as P035A2, P035A3, and P035A4 and many others.

Analyst
Dated: 251203, or 12/3/2025 (US format)