LJ Brain Trust: Transcription?

[cjsmith]

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.]

Comments

[kuangning]

Yeah, count me as offering as well. I'm still not working, and even a bit would help. :P

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yikes, wow. Let me think a bit more, but I'll keep in mind that you're potentially interested. I counted the tapes: seventy. I would be shocked if this were less than four forty-hour weeks of work, because I can't imagine being able to transcribe in under double the runtime. (Of course if anyone but me or software or a professional house does the transcribing, I'll have to ask permission of another person whose voice is on the tape.) Anyhow, I'll stew on this a bit. And thank you.

[kuangning]

Thank you, as well. Hopefully you'll figure something out that works. :)