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Young children's play is highly multimodal, with gesture, gaze, movement and speech often combined simultaneously in collaborative meaning-making. This article argues for a multimodal social semiotic perspective on play, recognising that this requires representation of data that brings multimodal elements into careful consideration. In this article, multimodal transcription is used to examine a video recording of three and four-year-old children playing a chasing game in an English nursery school. Map-like transcripts, including an animated transcript, are used to document an instance of their play, drawing particular attention to placement in space over time. Whilst such moments of play may at first appear fleeting and chaotic, multimodal transcription reveals the communicative, creative and agentive capacities of young children in a multitude of forms. The transcripts highlight and make evident the ways in which roles and rules of play are carefully negotiated moment-by-moment in multiple modes. In this way, map-like multimodal transcripts are presented as devices to highlight meaning-making where it may not normally be looked for, seen or recognised.

This article takes as its starting point a recognition of play as meaning-making, and the playground as a rich and dynamic 'meaning-makerspace' where children draw moment-to-moment, rapidly and readily on the multiple resources available to them to make signs of their interest evident. These resources are drawn from their own lifeworlds, folkloric and site-specific imagination, transmitted game forms from the past, and their pleasure and affective response to contemporary media. The playground is, therefore, a dynamic site for making and re-making, reflecting the concept of 'makerspace as mindset', where creative, collaborative meaning-making occurs ceaselessly in a range of modes. To illustrate this position, we share findings from 'Playing the Archive', an 'Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council' funded project exploring archives, spaces and technologies of play. Building upon the Iona and Peter Opie Archive of play from the 1950s-1960s, the project involved ethnographic research in two contemporary London primary school playgrounds, working with children aged 7-11 as co-researchers. A range of multimodal methods were used with the children to gain insights into their play, including iPads as filmmaking devices, chest-mounted GoPro cameras, voice recorders, drawings and mapping of playspaces. The research highlights that contemporary play exists not only in physical playgrounds, but increasingly in globalised 'virtual playgrounds' such as video games and social media. While these playworlds may at first appear separate, we identified ways in which virtual play intersects and inflects activity in the physical playground. We argue that play should therefore be seen as a series of 'laminates' drawing variously on media culture, folklore and the children's everyday lived experiences, re-mixed and re-mediated inventively in the playground.

Video is an increasingly popular data collection tool for those undertaking social research, offering a temporal, sequential, fine-grained record which is durable, malleable and sharable. These characteristics make video a valuable resource for researching Early Years classrooms, particularly with regard to the study of children's interaction in multiple modes, which might include gaze, facial expression and movement in addition to language. Collecting video and carrying out multimodal analysis presents both possibilities and challenges, not least because multimodal methodologies are still in relative infancy. One particular challenge is developing forms of multimodal transcription. This paper seeks to reflexively explore the effect of applying different transcription conventions to the same section of video to investigate how two children interact at a computer in an Early Years classroom. It is suggested that the modes to which the researcher attends, and how these are (re)presented in transcripts, shape the analytical and rhetorical interpretations of children's interaction, with multimodal transcription potentially enabling particular insights into patterns within and between modes as they are orchestrated in interaction.