SOAN 098: Senior Research Project Master Class (SC)

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

• You can use Adobe Premiere Pro on your own computer, or on public computers (e.g. Media Center, Libraries).
  • The Media Lab in Beardsley is a particularly good place to transcribe your interviews. They have powerful computers and staff who can provide support. Bring headphones.
• Instructions for using Speech to Text in Premiere Pro

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 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

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.

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?