How do people do this?

[jethrien]

I'm trying to transcribe an interview I filmed with a curator. I'm going nuts, and it's taking forever. I guess the real problem is that I type a little slower than he talks, so I keep having to pause the video every couple seconds and catch the typing up. So. Boring. And it really makes me hyper-aware of how long people can talk for, and how many filler syllables get thrown in. (And he's unusually good at this, too - I've transcribed much worse.)

Oh god, I'm at 33:40, and the bar isn't even 2/3 of the way through yet...

Comments

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

Stenographers use special keyboards and tricks (they go at one combined keystroke per syllable, rather than per letter), and before the advent of typewriters, they used tricky shorthand methods. Almost no one types fast enough to transcribe on a normal keyboard, QWERTY, Dvorak, or otherwise.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I did not know that. Hey, that's random information, and makes me feel better about my typing speed.

[edgehopper.livejournal.com]

During the deposition I attended back in October, we had a program called LiveNote that displayed the transcript as the stenographer typed. The current state of the art is pretty cool--as the stenographer types, the program displays the typed syllables phonetically, and then software automatically tries to guess the correct word from context at the word breaks. Afterwards, the stenographer reviews the transcript to fix errors. Check "Stenography" on Wikipedia for more cool info.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

I actually knew this--In one of my classes senior year, there was a guy who was severely hearing-impaired, so he actually had a stenographer come to the lectures and transcribe them so he could read them off a laptop while the professor spoke. I ended up sitting behind him fairly often, because I found the subtitles really helpful, myself.

[hyouneko.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine in Seattle is taking classes to become an Stenographer and I've actually seen her practice keyboard. It's a pretty interesting little device.

And I agree about being able to type what people have to say. I'm generally a very fast typer (as much time as I spend at a computer, it's not surprising) and I have problems keeping up with speech.