{"id":515,"date":"2022-06-30T16:01:41","date_gmt":"2022-06-30T19:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0157\/?p=515"},"modified":"2022-06-30T16:01:43","modified_gmt":"2022-06-30T19:01:43","slug":"challenges-with-interview-transcription","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0157\/challenges-with-interview-transcription\/","title":{"rendered":"Challenges with Interview Transcription"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Having completed Assignment 4, I’ve been working on revising the final paper to ensure the content has the correct tense, as well as conducting and transcribing interviews conducted and recorded using Zoom<\/a>. Transcribing has been challenging, not because the act of listening and writing down difficult (though it is time consuming). Rather, the challenge has been in the rabbit holes of “efficiency” I found myself going down to try and speed up the process using software.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A quick Google search<\/a> shows that there is no<\/a> end<\/a> to<\/a> transcription<\/a> software<\/a> offerings and websites<\/a> touting<\/a> the<\/a> benefits<\/a> of<\/a> any<\/a> or<\/a> many. These software offerings can be divided into two types: Manual and AI-based. Manual offerings tend to be a mixture of text editor and audio\/video media player, as well as some additional items such as foot pedal integration to start\/stop the recording in a hands-free manner. AI-based are far more efficient time-wise as you load your audio\/video file and AI algorithms take care of all the hard work of transcription.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Initially, I was keen to use AI to take care of this, however, most of the options that seemed highest-rated were online and, because of this, had quite standard content ownership and\/or privacy policies … meaning you give them right to the content or what you upload, and similar variations of the idea. As the interviews were conducted under the auspices that the collection and analysis would be private and follow specific ethics guidelines, this method was ruled out quickly, leaving manual solutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not having to conduct interviews frequently in my job, and only having 7 participants, there was little incentive to purchase transcription software. That left finding a free option, choosing Express Scribe<\/a> as it seemed to contain all I would need and was touted as being a “professional solution.” Sadly, I found the scrubbing tool clunky and difficult to use and, after the frustration of using Express Scribe for a while, decided to use tools that I already had and that worked well for their dedicated tasks: VLC<\/a> for audio\/video playback and TextEdit<\/a> for transcribing simple text files. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final efficiency challenge I found was that of creating the Text Files quickly and easily. TextEdit is a great tool, but by default, operates similar to Wordpad<\/a> in that the files it creates employ rich text and formatting. While this might be fine in some instances, because I will ultimately copy the text from this file into Excel, and Excel pastes both content and formatting by default, I would have to strip this formatting every time; An alternative is setting TextEdit to operate in text-only mode, removing any formatting options at the source. Furthermore, I would have to set where the file would need to be saved, navigating through the file structure every time, which I found time consuming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of doing this every time, I was able to find a more elegant solution: Creating a macOS script using Automator<\/a>. Using these instructions<\/a> I created an Automator script that would create a blank text file inside the current folder in Finder. This script places a button on the toolbar inside of Finder, allowing you to click it and add a new, blank text file wherever you want. The downside is that, by default, the button uses the Automator icon which isn’t self-explanatory at all. I was able to find instructions on how to change this<\/a> and, following this guide, replaced the Automator icon with the icon from TextEdit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, it was a good exercise to understand what options are available for transcribing audio\/video files. While AI-based options would provide the end result quicker, there are ethics and privacy concerns that, in my case, could not be overcome with this solution; Similarly, more manual, all-in-one transcription software solutions were difficult to use. Instead, using separate tools like VLC and TextEdit, combined with an Automator script, have allowed me to quickly create the needed text files for transcribing, listen to the audio\/video files, and not only play but scrub through the audio\/video files more easily than what Express Scribe was able to provide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having completed Assignment 4, I’ve been working on revising the final paper to ensure the content has the correct tense, as well as conducting and transcribing interviews conducted and recorded using Zoom. Transcribing has been challenging, not because the act of listening and writing down difficult (though it is time consuming). Rather, the challenge has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":174,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0157\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0157\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0157\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0157\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/174"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0157\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0157\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":518,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0157\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515\/revisions\/518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0157\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0157\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0157\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}