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I have a bunch of cassette tapes of people talking and would love to have them transcribed. Formal services will do this for an enormous fee, but I'm not sure I need that kind of quality. I'm not exactly going to publish the results. I just want them searchable with "grep".
Starving students would probably do it for $10/hr, but even that gets kind of stiff. With the amount of time the transcriber would have to stop the tape and catch up on typing, even assuming everything's perfectly audible the first time through, I can't imagine a 60-minute tape taking any less than two hours... and I think I have something like a hundred of these.
Ideas for doing this cheaply and quickly? Or should I abandon the whole project if it's not worth $2K to me?
[edit: I counted, I have seventy tapes. Each has a bit less than 60 minutes of talk on it. I've transcribed two and each one of those took me many hours, my vague memory says four or five. I can imagine that someone skilled or less perfectionist might get that down to something closer to two.]
Starving students would probably do it for $10/hr, but even that gets kind of stiff. With the amount of time the transcriber would have to stop the tape and catch up on typing, even assuming everything's perfectly audible the first time through, I can't imagine a 60-minute tape taking any less than two hours... and I think I have something like a hundred of these.
Ideas for doing this cheaply and quickly? Or should I abandon the whole project if it's not worth $2K to me?
[edit: I counted, I have seventy tapes. Each has a bit less than 60 minutes of talk on it. I've transcribed two and each one of those took me many hours, my vague memory says four or five. I can imagine that someone skilled or less perfectionist might get that down to something closer to two.]
