Transcription is a practice central to qualitative research, yet the literature that addresses transcription presents it as taken for granted in qualitative studies. In this article the author provides a review of three decades of literature on transcription between 1979 and 2009. The review establishes core understandings and issues that have informed the transcription literature, including the ways it is said that transcription is overlooked in qualitative research. Discussion of the literature raises the need for more empirical studies that examine transcription in qualitative research, and suggests specific questions that qualitative researchers might address in relation to transcription and its reporting.

Research confirms that young children engage in digital literacy practices in the home. While there is an emerging body of work that documents the diversity of these practices, there is little research that examines their acquisition in situ. This article uses conversation analysis to describe and explicate the social accomplishment of a number of activities that led to and constituted a young child’s Google search to find information about a lizard. Discussion of the child’s activities considers the local and situated use of technology, including how the child and adult jointly obtained the information needed by the child to read and write texts related to the search. The article establishes ways that social interaction contributes to young children’s acquisition and use of digital literacy practices, including when learning about print and about techology itself.

Bringing a social interaction approach to children's geographies to investigate how children accomplish place in everyday lives, we draw on ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approaches that recognize children's competence to manipulate their social and digital worlds. An investigation of preschool-aged children engaged with Google Earth™ shows how they both claimed and displayed technological understandings and practices such as manoeuvring the mouse and screen, and referenced place through relationships with local landmarks and familiar settings such as their school. At times, the children's competing agendas required orientation to each other's ideas, and shared negotiation to come to resolution. A focus on children's use of digital technologies as they make meaning of the world around them makes possible new understandings of place within the geographies of childhood and education.

MUCH OF WHAT IS WRITTEN about digital technologies in preschool contexts focuses on young children's acquisition of skills rather than their meaning-making during use of technologies. In this paper, we consider how the viewing of a YouTube video was used by a teacher and children to produce shared understandings about it. Conversation analysis of talk and interaction during the viewing of the video establishes some of the ways that individual accounts of events were produced for others and then endorsed as shared understandings. The analysis establishes how adults and children made use of verbal and embodied actions during interactions to produce shared understandings of the YouTube video, the events it recorded and written commentary about those events.