111Transcript's blog

Transcribing software

If you're transcribing from digital files, there are many free or relatively cheap software programs to choose from. And you don't have to have the latest computer and operating system to use them.

The two I use and recommend are:

InqScribe, available at www.inqscribe.com The latest version costs $99, but you can try it free for 30 days to see if you like it. I bought an earlier version when it was much cheaper and run in on a PC with Windows 98 that I had bought from a pawnshop for $175 (and which has paid for itself many, many times over!), and on a Mac OS X 10.2.8. InqScribe let's you put in timecodes as you type, and also allows output of subtitles, something I've found very useful for the documentary work I do.

NCH Software's Express Scribe is free and was developed by an Australian company, which hopes that by giving you access to this free software you'll be tempted to buy some of their other products. I downloaded it to my new laptop which runs on Vista OS, and love the very easy on-screen controls.

Neither of these applications requires a footpedal, though you can use the software with a footpedal if that's your preference. Though I'm used to footpedals because of my years of experience with cassette-based dictation machines, I prefer to use hotkeys instead.

Both programs support a number of different word processing applications, Word, of course, being standard. They also support a number of different types of audio file formats.  InqScribe also  supports video files.

But I don't want to transcribe!

All this talk about plays reminds me of some advice that was given at an oral history seminar I went to a couple of years ago. One of the participants asked if the presenter had any thoughts on who produced good transcripts, as she didn't want to do them herself.

The answer was: student actors. 

For a very good reason. Once you place spoken words on a page, any subtle meaning that was conveyed by the voice, pauses, and so on, can be very easily lost. Actors work backwards from the written word to the spoken word, so they're acutely aware of that. Not that you want them to produce a play script with [pause] and [sighs]  in them. Those kinds of insertions distract the reader.

But if the students are attuned to the kind of punctuation that can indicate a pause, for example, then you're going to end up with a better transcript. Often they need the work to support themselves, and transcribing can usually be done at a time that fits with their schedule.

So, it's worth pinning a notice on a bulletin board at a local college or university that offers drama studies when you're looking for transcribers.

Horror stories

Back in the early 1990s, when I first started transcribing interviews for Miranda, she was working at the cutting edge of the technology available to us then. This was especially true of a project about murder, a one-woman show called Verbatim, which she co-wrote with William Brandt, a Kiwi playwright living in London, based on interviews Miranda was doing in New Zealand.

It seems quaint now--especially as it's not that long ago in people years, though it's eons in technology years--but at the time, New Zealand's only link to the World Wide Web was through the University of Waikato. So, in order for the transcripts to be emailed to William, I had to copy them to a floppy disk that was then driven up to Victoria University of Wellington, from where the email could be sent to him via the Waikato server.

But it wasn't that technology I most remember. It was the content of the interview and my fateful decision to upgrade my wordprocessing software in the middle of transcribing it. I had password-protected the file so the student who was staying with me and sharing my computer wouldn't accidentally stumble into the particularly gruesome details of the murder one interviewee had committed. Unfortunately, once I upgraded the software, there was no way to get back into my file, and I had to re-transcribe hours of stuff I'd never wanted to hear in the first place.

Lesson learned: never do anything drastic to your software in the middle of a project! Normally, having a backup of your files is a guarantee you won't be too inconvenienced by not being able to access information on your hard drive, but in this case the backup copy was password protected too.

The first family

Some of the most interesting interviews I transcribed in the 1990s were for a series of projects undertaken by one of NZ's leading actors, Miranda Harcourt. The Harcourts are kind of like the Redgraves in Britain; the First Family of the Theatre. When I was a child, Peter and Kate Harcourt, Miranda's parents, were household names. Kate was especially well-loved because of her radio show Listen with Mother. Miranda honored both parents in her work.

Her short film about her father, Voiceover, won the Best Short Film award in the 1997 NZ Film and Television Awards. It recounts the time that Peter--young and just beginning a career in radio--could no longer read on air the letters that WWII soldiers had written for their families in the event they were killed.

The commissioned play Miranda co-wrote with her husband Stuart McKenzie for the 1998 NZ International Festival of the Arts was called Flowers From My Mother's Garden. Peter had died before Voiceover was made, but Miranda was able to collaborate with Kate on the play. There's a wonderful photo of the two of them, taken around that time, in the Online Encyclopedia of New Zealand.

How I came to do transcripts

Way back in the 1980s, I was a midwife at the birth of IBM's relational database software DB2 and SQL.

Not that I lived in the US. No, I lived down at the bottom of the world in New Zealand, which at the time had only four trading banks. Their activities were strictly regulated by the government. The four banks used a common clearinghouse called Databank, and that was where I worked on what was then the biggest software redevelopment project in the Southern Hemisphere.

It was called IBIS--Integrated Banking Information System--but it became DODO after not too many years and many, many too many hirings of overseas programmers and analysts and architects and project managers who didn't have to pay tax and drew the project out to absurd lengths without ever actually producing a usable system. They came mainly from Britain and the Philippines and were totally competent but also thrilled to be living in a tax-free paradise.

As Systems Encyclopedia Administrator (in waiting), it was my job to use DB2 and SQL to create and report on data neighborhoods for the engineers and architects creating IBIS. We had someone from IBM seated on every floor in our building and they would report to the lab back at Almaden, California, on how things were going at the Databank beta testing site.

As the redundancy ax began to fall, we used to joke that if there ever came a day that there was a market for dating software, IBIS would be ideal. By 1990, the data model on the customer information side of things had gotten down to the level of eye color and tattoos.

On the day the ax finally fell, the prospect of having to compete with a couple hundred other computer professionals for jobs wasn't one I relished. Instead, I took the skills I'd learned desktop-publishing the data maps and user manuals into a job producing distance learning materials. A small part of that job also involved covering the receptionist's lunch break and typing up memos and letters from the boss's dictaphone tapes. I left that job to work for a media monitoring company, transcribing radio news and occasional current affairs television affairs programs.

In my spare time, I started transcribing interviews for a friend who was co-writing a play about murder. Then she  made a  short film about her father, and I transcribed the interviews for that. And so on. Just a little bit here and there, even after I got a full-time job transcribing debates in New Zealand's House of Representatives in 1992.

I'm addicted to transcribing, and I swear it's a personality thing. I'm really interested in people, but I'm hopeless at social interaction with them. I ask way too many personal questions without knowing if they're appropriate or not. So, for me, the next natural step was to get interested in oral history. Which is a situation in which I can ask way too many personal questions in a structured context so that the person I'm asking knows to expect them.

But enough about me! In my next post, I'll talk about some of the wonderful projects my clients have hired me to work on.