I am finally close to transcribing the one live interview I did during the interview stage of my dissertation. It is long and daunting. Compared with the email responses, I feel there's no contest. The email replies are consise, easier to cite, and on topic. Email responses contain complete sentences. In person, people begin a sentence, backtrack, and begin the sentence again, making for a very scattered and fragmented quotation.
The live interview, if accurately reported in text, distorts the communication. I interviewed an intelligent and eloquent bisexual activist, but her use of affirmation-seeking phrases such as "you know?" or "right?" seem to communicate an insecure and tentative woman when they appear as text. In the live interview they perform quite a different role, but the decision of whether or not to weed them out of the text is, it seems to me, a slippery slope. Do I type what she said or what I think she meant to say? And where does that go in terms of my creative imagination overriding her intention or misunderstanding her entirely?
As a journalist, I have always preferred email interviewing. It quotes well in print, and it provides a hard copy of the transmission in case there are issues of the quote's accuracy. As a person who had been interviewed, I again prefer emeail. It gives me a time to compose my response and allows me to avoid off the cuff remarks that made sense contextually, but in fail once in print.
