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SOAN 098: Senior Research Project Master Class (SC)

Sociology & Anthropology 98: Senior Research Project Master Class (Ghannam, Schuetze) Fall 2023

Transcribing Audio or Video Recordings

As Swarthmore students, you can use Adobe Premiere Pro to transcribe audio and video files.

 

What machine transcription can do:

  • Make your interviews easier to skim
  • Help you identify where topics came up in your interviews
  • Give you a rough sense of what the conversations were about

What machine transcription cannot do:

  • Provide a fully accurate written record of your interviews.
    • Although speech-to-text technology has improved significantly over the past few years, it still falls short in various important ways.
    • Craptions, a recent episode of 99% Invisible, goes into the related issue of automatic captioning for videos.
  • Consistently recognize specialized terminology and jargon
  • Reliably transcribe people's names

Generating research ideas

Diagramming Your Ideas

In Kristin Luker's Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences (2008), Luker introduces the bedraggled daisy diagram [Google search for examples of filled-out diagrams].

You can use this tool to track and identify areas of the scholarly literature that relate (in some way) to your topic.

Project Mapping

Literature Synthesis Matrix

Search Logs

Keeping track of your searches helps you make sense of your research process. It also saves time by avoiding duplicated effort.
 

Elements of a search log:

  • Write down your question(s) and interest(s)
  • Where you searched (e.g. JSTOR, Tripod) and when
  • What you did (which keywords? advanced search?)
  • How well did it go?  What did you gain?  What's next?

Note Taking

Slides: Organizing Your Research