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- Outsourcing and evaluation
- Transcription guidelines
- Protocol
- Tools
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The
Library of Congress' Veterans
History Project website
offers this advice on professional transcription
services:
"If you have the financial resources, you may
want to hire a professional transcription service,
preferably one with experience transcribing oral
history recordings. These companies charge in the
range of $100-$125 per hour of tape, but be sure
that the cost covers making corrections to a first
draft and includes delivery of the final transcript
in both paper and electronic form. Sometimes it is
possible to get funding from state humanities councils
to transcribe collections of oral histories once
they have been recorded and assembled into a collection."
"If you have a group of interviews to transcribe,
it is best to hire the same service to do all of
them to ensure consistency in overall approach and
in the spelling of personal and geographic names,
acronyms, and technical terms. Provide the transcriber
with a list of these names and terms together with
well-labeled copies of the tapes. Do not send the
transcriber your master tape."
For evaluation, see the "Tape/Transcript
Processing Guidelines" section in the
Oral History Association's Evaluation Guidelines.
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Whether you outsource the transcription
or chose to do it yourself, you should first assemble
a set of local guidelines for how to identify speakers,
what to do if portions are inaudible, how to handle
dialect, and so on. Below are some excellent guides
to transcription that can serve as a model. Note that
there is no one right way to treat transcriptions,
the important thing is to be consistent.
The Southern Oral History Program publishes a sample
transcript made from tapes in their How To
Guide. For other examples, look at the Websites
of Oral History
Collections.
See also these published resources from Alta
Mira Press:
- Willa K. Baum, Transcribing and Editing Oral
History (1991)
- Willow Roberts Powers, Transcription Techniques
for the Spoken Word (2005)
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a.Whether outsourcing or transcribing
in house, always work from a copy of the audio, not
the master recording. A listening copy of the interview
in .mp3 or Real Audio format can be burned to CD and mailed to the transcriptionist.
Since even compressed audio files are usually too large to email as attachments,
they can also be transferred electronically with file-transfer protocol (FTP)
software such as SSH(available
via site license from most universities for affiliated personnel) or Hummingbird(available
as a free download).
b. Transcribe the
interview to create a verbatim text
version of the spoken audio. Digital
audio files can be transcribed using
Express Scribe software (see "Tools" section
below).
c. Send the first
draft of the transcription to the interviewer
for review and correction of any unclear
sections of audio.
d. Send a paper copy
of the revised transcript to the interviewee
for final approval. The interviewee
may make factual corrections to the
transcript but may not revise the content.
The release form may be signed at the
time of the interview or sent to the
interviewee along with the transcript.
e. Send the final
version of the transcript (and an audio
tape or CD of the interview if desired)
to the interviewee and the interviewer.
f. File the paper
transcript with the interview file.
If you are working with an archival
repository, deposit paper and digital
copies of the transcript with the archival
repository.
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a. Express Scribe by NCH Swift
Sound, available as a free download from http://www.nch.com.au/scribe,
is a useful software program for transcribing digital
oral history.
Express Scribe lets your computer function like
a traditional transcription machine. You can control
the speed of playback and other features by using
either computer hot keys or a USB foot pedal (which
sells for $79.50 plus $9.50 shipping). It must be
used in conjunction with a word processing program
such as Microsoft Word.
Express Scribe is very easy to use, and enables
the user to load an audio file from a portable recorder
or from any drive on the computer. Templates can
be saved to ensure consistent formatting. Once transcription
is finished, the text file can be dispatched as an
email attachment and the program tracks which files
have been completed and sent.
b. Many transcriptionists look
forward to an effective voice recognition software
program that would reduce the amount of time required
for manual transcription. Unfortunately, the nature
of currently available voice recognition programs,
such as Dragon Naturally Speaking, is that they can
only "learn" one voice, so they are useful
for dictation but not for oral history transcription,
which involves a two-way conversation with large
variations in speech patterns, accents, tone of voice,
etc.
The current general consensus is that the amount
of time necessary to edit transcripts generated by
voice recognition software equals or exceeds the
time required for manual transcription. The debates
over voice recognition software for oral history
can be viewed at http://www.h-net.org/~oralhist by
entering "voice recognition" in the search
box.
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