{"id":147,"date":"2011-08-04T13:51:40","date_gmt":"2011-08-04T12:51:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/?p=147"},"modified":"2011-08-09T21:02:05","modified_gmt":"2011-08-09T20:02:05","slug":"take-a-letter-miss-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/?p=147","title":{"rendered":"Costs of interview transcription: Take a letter, Miss Jones…."},"content":{"rendered":"
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"Listen verry carefully.... I will say zis anly wance"<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Quick post on something other than the ESRC, for a change…..<\/p>\n

Transcription is a major category of expense for social science research projects, and I’ve been wondering for some time whether it’s possible to make cost savings without sacrificing accuracy, consistency, confidentiality, speed of turnaround, and all of the other things we require.<\/p>\n

One problem is that there seem to be a wide variety of different pricing models.\u00a0 Some by hour of tape, some by hour of staff time, some by some other smaller unit of time.\u00a0 Another is that there are different types of transcription – verbatim (which includes every last hesitation and verbal tic) and then varying degrees of near-verbatim stuff.\u00a0 Some transcription is of fairly straightforward one-on-one interviews, but sometimes it’s whole focus groups or meetings where individual speakers need identifying.\u00a0 The quality of the recordings and the clarity of those speaking may be variable.\u00a0 I’ve also been assured that there are cases where a Research Associate with specialist knowledge (rather than a generalist audio typist)\u00a0 is required, though that was for a video recording.<\/p>\n

I imagine there are plenty of models of sourcing transcription across universities – in house capacity, a list of current\/former staff looking for extra work, or a contract with a preferred supplier.\u00a0 Or some kind of mixture of provision.\u00a0 One option would be to look at getting better value, but given the difficulty in comparing price and quality, I’m not sure how far this would get us.\u00a0 I’m also a little unhappy at the thought of trying to reduce what I suspect are already fairly low rates of pay.<\/p>\n

I wonder if technology has reached a point where it would be worth looking seriously at voice recognition software for producing a first pass transcript.\u00a0 At least for non-verbatim requirements, this might produce a document that would just need correcting and tidying up, which might be quicker (and therefore cheaper) than transcribing the whole thing.\u00a0 However, I can’t help remember an episode when a friend tried voice recognition software which couldn’t cope with his Saarrf Lahndahn<\/em> accent… which got more pronounced the more frustrated he got with its utter failure to anderstan’ wot ee waz sayin.\u00a0 But I’m sure technology has moved on.<\/p>\n

The ever-reliable Wikipedia<\/a> reckons that 50% of live TV subtitles were produced via voice recognition as of 2005, though there’s a “citation needed” for this claim.\u00a0 But even if true, I would imagine that a fair amount of speech on live TV is more scripted and rehearsed – and therefore easier to automatically transcribe – than what someone might say in a research interview.\u00a0 More RP accents, too, I’d imagine.<\/p>\n

Anyone have any experience of using voice recognition software for transcription?\u00a0 Or is the technology not quite there yet?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Quick post on something other than the ESRC, for a change….. Transcription is a major category of expense for social science research projects, and I’ve been wondering for some time whether it’s possible to make cost savings without sacrificing accuracy, consistency, confidentiality, speed of turnaround, and all of the other things we require. One problem … Continue reading “Costs of interview transcription: Take a letter, Miss Jones….”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[17,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-post-award","category-research-costs"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1OLY1-2n","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":167,"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions\/167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/socialscienceresearchfunding.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}