Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Interview Blues

I have been listening to hours of interviews and trying to figure out a good way to mark them up without necessarily transcribing the whole thing. I initially tried to write out the main ideas when the person talked, marking times when I could, but that seemed to fail as soon as I realized that my typing skill was not that of a court reporter.

Thing is, I have probably over 20 hours of this stuff. What was I thinking when I decided to base my dissertation on interviews (not to mention newspaper articles in a language I can barely read)? Argh.

This makes me a little happier.

2 comments:

Jill Murray said...

Voice recognition software?

Or mark down all the times of comments that sound useful and then go back and transcribe only those?

Anonymous said...

Actually, there are several different solutions to deal with annotation and transcription. I was thinking of sending you a list of recommendations. But none of them really makes the process incredibly quick and efficient.
One way to think about this is that you're digging in your data. This period is the one when you actually make sense of the whole thing.