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

[therobbergirl.livejournal.com]

When I was a lowly student, I had to transcribe taped interviews for someone else's thesis. These interviews averaged 60 minutes each. It took me about four hours for the first few and after that, I could do it in about two. It helps a lot if your transcriber uses a dictaphone (no, use your finger like everyone else, ha ha ha). With a dictaphone, you put a pedal on the floor, press it with your foot to move the tape forward, and release the pedal to pause and rewind a little bit. You can customize how far to rewind. To rewind extra, you just tap the pedal a few quick times. For example, I had set mine to four second rewind. If I quickly pressed and released three times, it would rewind about 12 seconds. That was amazingly useful and speeded up transcription time immensely.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Oo, now I understand what ohhjuliet meant. That's worth a thought. Sadly, it means a) if I do decide it's a good idea to pay someone else to do (part of) the work, that person has to be local, and b) every user has to come up to speed on it. Still, though, if these things can be purchased or rented for cheap, they could really help.

[therobbergirl.livejournal.com]

I did a search on Office Depot and they want a lot of money (~$240) for the transcriber unit. (Search for "transcriber" rather than "dictaphone" -- distaphone gets you the recording part of the device.) My Ebay search turned up a ton of items priced ludicrously high and unbelievably low.

As to getting up to speed, they're very easy to learn. I was comfortable with it inside of five minutes.

I wonder if there's some sort of place that deals in old, crunchy office supplies. You don't need a modern, shiny one. An old clunky heavy thing from the 1980s or even earlier would do the trick.

Do watch out for cassette size. Most of the ones I see on Ebay and Office Depot are for micro cassette. I don't know if that's what you have.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I too did a quick web search and found new units were pricey. O'course, if it cuts transcription time in half, that's like paying $240 to have half of it done, which is a bargain. Still worth looking for a used one, though.