Transcription took a long time. The interviewees spoke in Papiamento, which was harder for me to listen to and type verbatim than English would've been. There are accents, for example, which I left out, choosing to capitalize the accented letter for the sake of speed. Also, I'm more familiar with English spelling rules than Papiamento ones---schools in Curacao started teaching Papiamento just after I left the island to go off to college.
So this is how I did it: two windows, one the video, one a word processor, and I just toggled back and forth between the two. I think it took me about 1 hour to transcribe 10 minutes of speech, but I wasn't very precise about keeping track.
I haven't posted in a while since returning to California. I had to get over the jet lag and then deal with the reality of being back in Monterey---reverse culture shock, if you will---and get caught up after a 3-week absence.
And there was a bit of procrastination. You see, each of these tapes is 60 minutes long. Not all of them are full of footage, but there's also all the footage on my back-up camera, which has a hard drive and doesn't use tape. I don't know how many hours are on that. Eek!
Cables:
- to charge my video camera
- to charge my back-up video camera
- to charge the laptop (a rental)
- to connect my video camera to the laptop
- to connect my back-up video camera to the laptop
Each one gets it's own baggie.
Pretty crazy, eh?
