The agony and the ecstasy of research
I’m transcribing interviews with my London-based bloggers at the moment and no matter how many times it happens it still fills me with pleasure to hear the really interesting stuff come out as I listen effectively for the first time (during an interview itself I find I am only about 50% listening and 50% thinking about what to ask next or what I might have missed). But transcribing is also a gruelling discipline. I started transcribing one woman just now and was five minutes in thinking ’she’s interesting but she’s also speaking quite fast - I hope I won’t wear out before I finish’. Then I looked up at the audio track and saw that this interview is two hours long!
Most of them tend to be an hour to an hour and 20 minutes but that’s both the strength and the drawback to semi-structured interviewing. If you are getting good material you can keep it going but at some point you are going to end up having to transcribe and then analyse all that material which you tend to forget is much more time-consuming than the interview itself. This one interview will probably take me about eight solid hours just to transcribe (and since I can’t transcribe like that without copious breaks that probably means a few days’ work). Phew. Better get back to it…
November 2nd, 2005 at 3:23 pm
I somewhat embarrassingly admit that an assistant transcribed the interviews I’ve done for my phd-project. I interviewed my informants where they preferred - usually at a caf?. I always suggested calm places, but the poor transcriber still had to struggle with a lot of background noises. Although I’m happy that the project I’m a part of has some fundings for such tasks, I still think it’s very valuable to transcribe one’s own interviews. I did miss a vital part of the research process. But having the possibility of not transcribing the interviews myself, the choice was easy. It’s just sooo time-consuming. Besides I really hate listening to my own voice…
November 8th, 2005 at 6:24 am
hi david,
i am about to embark on my own fun-filled whirl on the interview/transcription-go-round… i cam across your blog after googling ‘mac voice recorder transcribing’.
and, of course, i found myself delighted to come across someone who is interested in new media, and member of AoIR! (small world…)
anyhow, i did see that you recommended using garageband, creating ‘backups’, and pointed to Katwa for transcription - but would you mind specifying other tips, such as an inexpensive mic, and which software you ended up choosing to transcribe with?
thanks so much!
November 8th, 2005 at 10:34 am
To update my advice a bit, I discovered that using Audacity to record interviews works just fine as long as you set the MP3 bit rate down substantially (you don’t need to record voice at 128Kbps).
I used my iBook’s built-in mike and it worked OK but there’s a little Sony external microphone that works really well (I’ll try to find it). I use Transana (which is free and open source) to help me do the actual transcription and it is very useful (it also has tools for handling video and for subsequent coding).
November 10th, 2005 at 5:53 am
my first interview went ok - audacity is good so far. for transcription, i’m debating transcriva v. transana. another tool i was referred to is Scribe.
http://www.nch.com.au/scribe/