Jesse here. I coordinate our amazing and dedicated transcriber team, hailing from all over the planet: Ann, Carolyn, Fred, Janet, Loren, Mark, Mary, Tracy, and Tsogyal. I also meet regularly with Ken and the other team leaders at Unfettered Mind: Valerie (Taxonomy), Clemens (Audio) and Ann (UM Ning Community).
In addition to the leadership role, I also find myself frequently up to my elbows in technical gears and grease as I work with a variety of technologies to get the raw typed transcripts out to the web in a standard, readable way.
Within the last month, the Transcription Team finished transcribing all 37 of the Then and Now podcasts, and are now moving forward with our Auditing phase, to ensure the transcripts are complete. We're also starting up proofreading and editing the transcripts, and would definitely like to hear from anyone with proofing and/or editing experience who has some time.
Right now, I'm working directly with Franca, our UnfetteredMind.org web designer, to put up five sample transcripts for UM readers to enjoy. We have the various sections of the podcast broken out into topics, and each topic can be listened to with Clemens' clipping utility that he wrote for Unfettered Mind. I think it's going to bring a whole new dimension to transcripts!
As a part of this effort, we also are working with Valerie and our Taxonomy team to get an index of keywords to make the podcasts searchable beyond the standard full-text search. It's exciting and a little bit of a stretch sometimes as we bring together a wide variety of skill sets to make this happen.
I'll be writing more as things shift and grow.
Jesse
Hi Jesse - this is really great. I'd be interested to learn about tools and processes that you're using in this project. Are you using any Transcription / Voice recognition software?
ReplyDeleteHi Marie!
ReplyDeleteWe worked out a custom process to keep the work flowing among our 8 transcribers.
We have an online repository (a wiki actually) where we store the transcripts. It keeps track of versions and changes we make along the way.
For workflow, we keep an online spreadsheet of transcripts and defined phases that each one goes through on its way to the web.
When a person finishes a step, they put the date next to their name (which they enterered when they started the step). This signals to someone else that they can pick it up to begin the next phase. So far, this has worked pretty well!
Many of us use ScribeExpress (it's my tool of choice!). I believe one gentleman uses voice recognition software: he listens to the podcasts and repeats what he hears - very little typing! But I don't recommend that for most of our transcribers, since setting that up is quite a task (and setting it up well is even harder). I've heard rumors of speech recognition technology from Japan/China that doesn't even require training! Can't wait to see that hit the states.
Regards...
Jesse