Is Data Sacred?

In "A Perfect Answer?" I suggested (a little unfairly) that Seong-eun's data is NOT REAL DATA. I did this partly because it seemed to fit her argument too well and partly because I wasn't carefully reading her transcript and I was a little annoyed (but not really at her) at the very literal reading of my book; we've got too many final answers that are too close to the categories suggested in the book and not enough answers that really look at the underlying principles.   For example, if you look at Eunshil's answer ("Margaret Are You Grieving?") you will see a very skillful method of orienting the game which has nothing to do with any category in my book: orienting the game by using a PUN ("a die game"). That's the kind of thing I was hoping for (and I'm not really sure why Jiyeong is so hard on this data, which I find quite delightful!)   Now, if you listen to the recordings that Seong-eun put up, you'll see that both Seong-eun and I are right. Seong-eun DOES use real data, and she's got the audio files to prove it. But she edits the data VERY heavily and the transcript is really an idealized version leaving out many (and in many places MOST) of the words and turns.   Is this legitimate, or is it "Hwang Woo Suk" research, where you make up the data to fit your conclusion? As with the Hwang Woo Suk affair, the answer is not as clear as you think.   There are some researchers (e.g. the Conversation Analysts) who insist on EXACT transcriptions, and who include ALL the pauses, giggles, breaths of air, repetitions, etc. Because the Conversation Analysts (e.g. Sacks, Jefferson, Schegloff, Seedhouse, Firth and Wagner) are so interested in turn taking, they think these things are very important. (People DO use things like breathing space to interrupt, and they also use things like giggles to prevent interruptions.) In Conversation Analysis, data is sacred; you can't change it any more than you can change the Bible.   But there are OTHER researchers, and Halliday is one of them, who discourage this. For Halliday, if you include all that stuff you really obscure the kind of thing that we are interested in analyzing, which is not turn taking but sentence construction and FUNCTION. Halliday wants to know not how we use language to take up space, but how we use language to DO things, and this can get lost if the transcription is too exact. For Halliday, data is sacred too, but like any sacred text it has to be interpreted.   I think that Seong-eun's interpretation is okay for the purpose of the FINAL EXAM. It's close enough to what she wrote so that I think her interpretation of it is really legitimate. HOWEVER--I also want the data for MY RESEARCH--so that I can write a new book! And in this new book, I need to look at things like length of sentence, number of turns, etc. So I need a more literal less interpretative data.   For that reason, I'm very grateful that she put the audio files up. Thanks, Seong-eun! Does anybody else have audio files they can send me?   dk