Reviewing of transcripts is one of the six-part series to the oral history transcription and introduction that we shall look at in this blog. Now, if you have manually transcribed your files, or if you have a used a transcription company or a software, you now have the transcripts, so then you need to review it or them depending on how many transcripts you have. However you got the transcription done, you need to review your transcripts. This is the last step before you analyze your data.
Depending on how you got your audios transcribed, will determine how long reviewing your transcripts will take. So, if you got a professional to transcribe your transcripts then this will be a very easy process and running through them will be an easy process as a few errors may appear in the transcripts. It should probably take you about 30 minutes to do this.
If you transcribed the transcripts yourself, it doesn’t necessarily mean they will be perfectly done. So, this can be a good time for you to go through and catch any errors you may have overlooked. You probably want to do this after you’ve transcribed all the interviews. Once you’ve transcribed the first interview and gotten a brief overview of what was said, you can put it aside and go to the next transcripts. Assuming you’ve transcribed 50 transcripts, once you’ve done all of them, just come back and just go through your transcripts and make sure they’re accurate and up to par.
What you’ll find in most instances is that once you’re at your 50th transcript you’ve become really good at transcribing and you may even see there are some details that you missed or that you want to improve on or change some data later. So, it’s always good to go through them again and freshen up on what the transcripts were all about before you start analysis.
If on the other hand you went for machine transcription using the services that we talked about in Machine Transcription: Advantages and Disadvantages, then you need to put in a lot of time to review your transcripts because they’re most likely going to have a couple of corrections to make. You might have to do a two-pass review, so review the first time and then come back again depending on the quality. The machine transcripts are dependent on so many factors, the accents, the quality of the audios, how good was the recording, all these things affect the quality. If these factors are poor and not corrected or looked into, a lot more errors and more time will be needed to review to get to the standards for analysis.
Once you’ve reviewed all your transcripts, then you want to back up and store your data ready for analysis. It’s best to have three versions of your final transcripts, one version on your computer that you’re going to work with, a second version that is stored somewhere preferably not locally meaning not directly on your computer, maybe on a friend’s computer or at an office somewhere, or in a flash disk or a hard disk. If it’s important information, you may have to encrypt the hard disk or flash disk and maybe password protect them as well. This is all so that if your laptop crashes or it gets stolen you have an external storage that is safe. I’d also recommend that you have a third backup that is online like some form of a secure cloud storage. A good example of a secure cloud storage would be Microsoft OneDrive.
How secure and how you manage those backups will depend on the confidentiality that you need to have for your data and the data protection that you need to have for your study. So, keep those in mind when selecting a backup for your data. But do make sure that you have at least three backups for your transcripts before you move on to analysis.
That’s it for this series, hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions let me know and I’ll be happy to answer them. If there’s any area you felt I did not cover in-depth let me know, I’ll be happy to write more about it. Remember always be kind, try to stay positive and learn to unwind.