Thick description is a method which focuses, for example, on the space holding apart a wink and a twitch. Though the two actions are visibly similar, the wink is meaningful, which is to say thick with inferences and implications. It is a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures.
Thick description is concerned with bringing light to that enormous, yet unphotographable gulf separating, for instance, a twitch and a wink, the first of which is one (involuntary) thing, the second of which is caught up in a rich communication system of public codes.
Thick description is the description of a multiplicity of complex, inter-knotted, conceptual, inferential, and implicit structures. Which cannot be written in conventionalized graphs of sound but only in transient examples of shaped behavior.