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

[daltong.livejournal.com]

I'm interested.

Perhaps I could do some for something in trade? If you don't come up with some easy solution, let's talk.

[joedecker.livejournal.com]

Any hope that the sound is good enough for voice recognition?

(I'm not optimistic.)

[shaktiqueen.livejournal.com]

I'd do it for you for under five hundred. I need xmas money.

[kuangning]

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

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

Count me as another starving student. Hell, if you get enough of us offering you could probably get it all done in about a day....

[ohhjuliet.livejournal.com]

If you bought the actual transcription recorder thingy and did it yourself, it might be cheaper and faster for you that way?

[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.

[deedeebythebay.livejournal.com]

I think you already have a couple of offers, but I'll let you know I type about 80+ words a minute and could sure use the money. Let me know if you're interested.

[ashiegrrrl.livejournal.com]

I'll do it! I'm poor as dirt too *wink wink*

I'd say I could do it for $10-$15 an hour, or something.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

make a whole bunch of phone posts :)