software
Power of software to bring system to data-chaos
Saturday, April 4th, 2009 | learning, reflection, tools | No Comments
I am in a very interesting place in my research right now. A very frustrating one as well - but mostly wildly exciting. I’m starting to bring together my data and investigate what actually happened - or at least what actually happened according to me, since I subscribe to the view that analysis = story telling (to some extent at least).
So there I’ve been sitting for the last few weeks, attempting to find a loose end in the bundle of data, which I could grab hold of and start unraveling this mess. My problem was that I had too many ends which I was trying to hold in my hands simultaneously - half-formed understandings, hunches, ideas, frustrations, scraps of old feelings about things. Now that’s all good for story-telling, but how about analysis? In my view, the actual analysis part of analysis (the part that’s not story-telling) - is about bringing some system to the data, and making the story transparent enough to be credible.
After tip-toeing around the issue for weeks, I finally decided that maybe, after all, doing some coding wouldn’t be such a bad idea (yes, I know, the thought should have occurred to me much earlier, and it did, but I was frightened of disaggregating my lovely complex picture into little bits of meaningless junk - untill I realised that my complex picture, so far frighteningly resembled meaningless junk itself).
And yesterday I finally found a tool to do it with - on a Mac! I once did an interview with a Masters student for a project I worked on - and she talked about how using one particular tool - Excel instead of only Word - completely changed her outlook on research, data, and even herself. Suddenly she thought in tables instead of extended text and felt more ’scientific’ in her thinking. While we can probably all agree that Excel does not equal scientific approach to anything at all, I had the same feeling yesterday when I finally started coding. I got myself HyperResearch which does the job remarkably well and is easier to use that some of the large CAQDAS systems that run exclusively (!!!) on Windows. With very little fuss it puts at your fingertips the power of categorising text and retrieving the categories in various combinations. It may well lack some of the functionality of the larger packages - such as building large hierarchies of codes and modelling the data - but I am ready to question the usefulness of such ‘quantification’ tools for qualitative research any day. And althugh I’ve not explored the software fully yet and may well come ot miss a BIT more sophisticated functions (a bit of hierarchy is always good to put my head in order) - so far it’s managed to calm down a bit my search for a way to bring some system to the madness that is my understanding of my data.
The joys of transcription
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 | tools | No Comments
Oh yes, it’s that time again. First time I did it in the park under a tree. Second time I did it on a yacht in between some Croatian islands in the hot hours of the afternoon. This year, I’m stuck in my office (and thus have access to the web) and am therefore sharing a couple of my favourite tools for transcription. (Yes, i really mean it, the interviews for last year’s M.Sc dissertation were indeed transcribed on a yacht. It was quite nice actually, especially because I was limited to however long the battery would last on my laptop, which was about 1.5 to 2 hours, and then had to wait for next time we were in harbour and I could charge it up - thus giving a semblance of productivity while reducing the guilt factor.)
Surprisingly few people I’ve talked to are aware of the tools that are freely available to reduce the pain of transcription - as much as you can possibly reduce such a thing. There are two tools that I currently use - for different purposes. I have no foot pedal or other specialised equipment - if you do, this may not be relevant to your needs.
The first tool I use is Transcriber, which is good for well.. your bread-and-butter getting from sound to text. It’s open source, so free to use, and has several useful features. Firstly it gives you a visual representation of the sound file along which your pointer moves, so that you can actually see when someone starts talking. That’s very useful for orienting yourself on a micro level and helps you to chunk up the recording more precisely. The chunking up is a second useful feature. Each time you press Enter, Transcriber inserts a break point in the transcript - and you can move between the break points by using arrow keys. I use break points for every turn in the interview, so that I can quickly jump between questions and answers for example. The programme also allows you to create any number of speakers and to assign a speaker to each turn as you go along - very useful when you’ve got 3 kids talking all at the same time (in case you actually manage to distinguish what any of them are saying). Finally, Transcriber allows you to alt+arrow a second or so in each direction of your current position - useful for hearing that elusive word again and again.
I am aware that there are loads of similar products out there to be had, but I’ve tried quite a few of them and never found one just as easy to use and having the features that I want (obviously this is a matter of preference, I’m just stating mine). There are certain draw backs to Transcriber - such as having to export and tidy up your trancsript when you’ve got to the (sweet) end of the recording. Since you’re typing in to Transcriber and not into your word editor of choice, you’ll need to export the transcript to HTML, copy and paste it over, and then spend some time formatting. Another quirk I’ve found is that when I convert my WMA files to MP3 (since Transcriber is somewhat limited on formats) i need to convert it in mono, or it’s going to sound scratchy in Transcriber. But I’d say it’s worth it - once you’ve got it set up, it does save you an awful lot of time - and it’s free.
The second tool that I’m currently using is a Mac-only tool called Global Transcribe which aids transcription of both audio and video by letting you play back your media in VLC player and use a global shortcut to stop and start your file from anywhere. It lacks all the visual tricks and segmenting that I like in Transcriber, so I don’t use it for primary transcription. I have, on the other hand, got a job where we’ve outsourced the transcription. Here I need to listen through the interviews and read through the transcription to pick up on any mistakes the transcriber may have made (where it was impossible for her to pick up technical vocab for example, but which makes instant sense to me). That’s where Global Transcribe comes in handy - I open the transcription up in Word and the sound file in VLC and then occasionally stop it (while being tabbed into Word, thus the global shortcut thing) to correct an error. Very efficient and a great time saver - and again: for free.
The same company do other free transcription tools, both for Mac and Windows, but I haven’t found them as useful as Transcriber - try them out, see what you think. I hope this has been helpful fome someone out there! 