Lots of Transcribing

Pacific Northwest
Research
Dissertation
Author

Joey Stanley

Published

April 27, 2017

Modified

July 18, 2018

Last summer, I collected roughly 40 hours of conversation from people in Washington State last year. Not an enormous corpus, but I’m quite proud of that dataset. Well, my goal was to transcribe one speaker gradually over the course of the year, finishing around now. Well, in 9 months, I’ve done about… one hour. I realized this week that I really really need to get these done.

Now, I haven’t just been slacking off doing nothing for the past school year. I’ve been very busy with my research assistantships and with other tasks. I’ve given workshops and seminars here at UGA, and my name has been on a lot of conference presentations in the past few months, even if I haven’t been able to attend them. I’ve put together this website as well.

I’ve got my second qualifying paper coming up (edit: see my post about it here and it occurred to me that if I want to graduate in a year, I had better get these recordings transcribed!

Because I am the way I am, I kept track of my transcription rate. I did the first hour or so in about 5 hours. Okay, so at that rate, it’ll take me around 200 hours of work to finish the transcriptions. Okay, so at an hour a day that’ll take me like 8 months. At two hours a day I’ll finish in like August. Yikes. That’s a lot of work.

So I decided to just get to it. I can calculate and project and write about it all I want, but it’s not going to get done unless I just go for it. And I’ve got to be the one to do it. Even though there are automatic transcribers out there, I’d have to double-check their work anyway, and if I need to listen to it all I might as well do it all myself. Plus, it’s nice to go through them again and listen to linguistic features I didn’t catch before. And there are a lot!


Edit: I’ve decided to tweet every so often to keep track of my progress and to keep myself motivated.

To see my excited tweetstorm for when I finished, see this new post.