Transana

I have finally been able to open Transana, the software program that I'm going to use to develop my transcripts for my At Home in Cyberspace research project. I've had the program for a couple of weeks but I needed to have access to QuickTime as well. I don't think I downloaded the latter correctly and so could not open it or delete it. That was very frustrating. A good soul on the helpdesk at work came to my rescue yesterday and I now have QuickTime and I can open Transana. The following descriptions capture the difference the transcription program has made so far.

scenario 1 - me doing my PhD a few years ago
At the time i had video recordings and audio tapes "lifted" from the recordings. I made word only transcripts from the audio tapes, and then worked for months going back and forth between the video recordings and the transcript (a word document on my computer). it was very intensive work, and I travelled a lot of kilometres walking between the TV screen and my computer.

scenario 2 -me doing the cyberspace project
I now have DVD recordings, and these have been uploaded to my computer. I purchased Transana from here. It was a snip at only US$50. Yesterday, I imported the first of my recordings into Transana. When I open the file I see the child in one corner of my computer screen. I see sound waves in the left hand corner that represents the talk that can be heard on the recording, and there is all sorts of information that will be useful (time is captured, for example). Underneath that is a screen for developing the transcript as I watch the recoding on the computer. just brilliant!

I'm clumsy using the program but I've enjoyed trying it out today and I will get faster with practice. To my delight, I discovered that some of the Jefferson notation symbols are available in the program and (perhaps more importantly) I can directly type in symbols from the computer keyboard. So, for example, I can use [ ] to show overlap. That's important for CA work.

So, I'm now set to develop transcripts of the At Home in Cyberspace project. It is several years since I developed a transcript from scratch (for my phD) and that took many months. The process will be slightly faster this time because I don't have 23 people (children) in the mix of the recording. Still, it will take a time and I haven't got a lot of that. I'm going to make notes about use of Transana as I go cos I reckon it could be useful for my on-going thinking and writing about transcription.