transcription mathematics

for anyone who isn't familiar with the term, transcribing refers to the process of typing up, into script form basically, that which is currently only in audio form.  it's great for interviewing because there's only so much you can take in when you're in the moment of speaking to someone– and only so much you can remember from only hearing everything once.  if you're like me, you can get a little paralyzed by information overload when you hear a lot and only hear it once.  so transcribing offers an opportunity to hear everything a second time and then have the information available in written form to review and pick at, etc.

the only thing about transcribing is that it takes just about forever.  you're really not going to listen straight through and type and keep up with audio.  we talk a lot faster than we think we do, and we type a lot slower than we think we do.  it sounds like it should be easy, but between typos, volume issues, and then just having a hard time making out certain murmured words... you may go over ten seconds of audio five or more times to get it down right.  that's nearly a minute to type out ten seconds of speech.

so yesterday we had two interviews, resulting in about 2 hours of audio, and today we have one interview, which we can readily assume will take somewhere between 35 minutes to an hour, giving us a total of about 2 and a half to 3 hours of audio after today's interview is done.

it takes about 3 hours (give or take 15 minutes for interruptions) for me to transcribe 1 hour's worth of audio (which is pretty darn nice if i say so myself).  so i'm looking at anywhere between 2.5x3 = 7.5 to 3x3 = 9 hours of transcribing ahead of us.

however, i successfully transcribed about 20 min. of the first interview yesterday...  if it takes 3 hours to transcribe 1 hour of audio, and 20 min is 1/3 of 1 hour, then it takes 1 hour to transcribe 20 min of audio... (which is about the time i spent transcribing yesterday...) so... i'm looking at 6.5 to 8 hours of transcribing now.

i like transcribing.  probably because i like typing.  probably because it's pretty straight forward.  but dang does it take forever.