As a book with ‘discourse’ in the title, it is not surprising that we have used many different kinds of textual data in it: website materials, Internet message boards, conversations between friends, radio and television interviews and talk shows, telephone talk, talk in institutional settings, interview and focus group data, magazine advertisements, and street signs. By and large, the data are our own, which are either transcribed orthographically (verbatim) or using Jefferson's (2004a) system for conversation analysis (see below). Other data are quoted from existing published sources, for which we had no control over the transcription system used and have simply used it exactly as originally written. A variety of transcription systems have therefore been used. Except in the case of some of the media data, we have anonymised each piece of data used, in accordance with academic codes of ethical conduct. The personal names, place names and all other identifiers used throughout the book are pseudonyms. Where there is no source mentioned in the Extracts, the material has been collected and transcribed by the authors.

The Internet message board data used in Chapter 7 were taken from a public site with unrestricted access. Despite this free access, there is some debate among Internet researchers about the use of such materials. Some argue that researchers should make themselves known to ‘users’ in ‘chatrooms’ and explicitly seek permission to use the data (e.g. Cherny 1999).