Sub Ubi

A few things I want to start rolling:

1. I need to start working with my data, but I have a lot of audio that _I_

   have to transcribe. This could take years. I wrote a folklorist friend

   who recommended indexing first, etc. This still doesn’t get around to the fact that

   my hands might fall off before I’m done.

   My running idea is to use a dictation program for this process. I will listen to the

   recordings, and dictate the contents to the computer. The quality of

   the recordings is such that I could never (or, with currently available technology could not)

   simply play the recording into the PC.

   Any thoughts on whether this is a good idea/time saver/wrist saver/gives you some other ideas?

2. I have kept my annotations up until this point in a BibTeX “database”. What

   I’d like to do now, however, is organize my notes more; when it comes time to write, I don’t want

   notes scribbled on the margins of papers (and nowhere else); instead, I’d like it

   if I could somehow easily search and access my notes, and perhaps be able to

   work with them and the notes I generate from the transcription process (although NUDIST will probably

   be used for that effort) on the computer, even if I don’t originally take the notes there.

   All of that is to say: do we have any leads on software that assists in the reading and

   writing process. If we don’t, we need to

3. Get the resources section going, and get the d*mn Wiki up. The former may

   take a bit of effort, as it was a kludged idea of mine. However, I did have something

   that would let people in disparate places maintain the resources section, which is necessary.

I think I’m going to do those things in reverse order; I’m going to get the

resources software working and push that out to the CS-ED.org participants.

Then, I’m going to collect the information I can on reading and writing tools, and

in parallel I’m going to see about starting in on the transcription with dictation

software. ViaVoice (dictation only) costs something $50 US, so that might be a start.

Thoughts?

M

I’m not quite settled in yet, but I’m getting close.

Welcome to Martha House, a new member of CS-ED.org. Hopefully she’ll inspire us

all to keep on plugging around here.

As an aside (I’ve been searching for transcription software today), I thought I’d mention that

I wish I had a

digital recorder that transfers to the PC by way of USB when I was doing my research. Damn. I have

to dub everything to the Mac before transcribing it…

Highly recommended (or something similar, anyway).

Does anyone have any recommendations on transcription software for either Mac, Windows, or Linux?