The first week of the semester. Our site supervisor proves to be just as organized as she claims and sends out assignments immediately.
Our first assignments (I am one of two interns this semester) are to transcribe interviews. "I've done this before." I tell myself. "It'll take a bit of time but it can be done." So it sit down and start plugging away and it immediately becomes clear where the challenges lie.
Challenge the First: This interview is so interesting I want to listen to the content and forget that I'm supposed to be taking this down word-for-word.
Challenge the Second: I didn't conduct the interview. Contrary to my previous experience transcribing an interview, I did not write the questions or conduct the interview so I could not predict what questions were being asked or what was being said. Also, having not been present at the time of the interview, I had no previous knowledge of the conversation flow on which to base predictions of conversation direction and word selection. Additionally, the voices are relatively new to me so I had to listen very carefully to what was being said in order to attempt to pick out words and phrases.
Solutions: Listening to the interview all the way through once before beginning the transcription process seems to be advisable in order to attain greater familiarity with the subject matter, voices and conversation flow.
As a result, I spent an hour and a half working on transcribing the first eight minutes of a fifteen minute interview. For a previous project transcribing an interview I'd conducted myself, I was able transcribe a 45 minute interview in four hours. There is a notable difference in speed of transcription. I also caught myself wishing I knew shorthand.
I am looking forward to what the semester has in store for me and, as I am hyper-aware of the shift in verb tenses in this post, I will sign off for now. Good night!
