Transcription

By Roeland Ordelman

Transcription is the systematic representation in written form of language: speech, sign language, or text in another writing form. In the academic discipline of Oral History research, transcription is an essential part of the methodology, as the transcripts are the main source for analysis of the Oral History interviews. In recent times, tools such as alignment are emerging that allow Oral History scholars to simultaneously use text transcripts and the original audio recordings during analysis. Outside academia, examples of transcriptions are the proceedings of court hearings or physician’s recorded voice notes. A verbatim transcript includes all dialogue spoken, word for word, including fillers, false starts, and repetitions.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology is increasingly used to support or even replace manual transcription. As speech recognition will produce errors that need to be corrected manually afterward, specialized tools are developed that try to make the correction work less tedious.

See more at this blog post about the CLARIN-Plus workshop on oral history .