Page 270 - DLIS402_INFORMATION_ANALYSIS_AND_REPACKAGING

Unit 12: Content Analysis

Partial Transcription Notes
Transcribing speech is very slow, and therefore expensive. An alternative that we (at Audience
Dialogue) often use is to make a summary, instead of a full transcription. We play back the recording
and write what is being discussed during each minute or so. The summary transcript might look
like this:
0’ 0" Moderator introduces herself
1’ 25" Each participant asked to introduce self
1’ 50" James (M, age about 25)
2’ 32" Mary (F, 30?, in wheelchair)
4’ 06" Ayesha (F, 40ish)
4’ 55" Markus (M, about 50) - wouldn’t give details
5’ 11" * Grace (F, 38)
6’ 18" Lee (M, 25-30, Java programmer)
7’ 43" Everybody asked to add an agenda item
7’ 58" ** James - reasons for choosing this ISP
This takes little more time than the original recording took: about an hour and a half for a one-hour
discussion. The transcriber uses asterisks: * means “this might be relevant” and ** means “very
relevant.” These marked sections can be listened to again later, and transcribed fully.
If you are testing some particular hypothesis, much of the content will be irrelevant, so it is a waste
of time to transcribe everything. Another advantage of making a summary like that above is that it
clearly shows the topics that participants spent a lot of time discussing.
An important note: if you record the times as above, using a tape recorder, make sure the tape is
rewound every time you begin listening to it and the counter is reset to zero, otherwise the counter
positions won’t be found.

What form does the content take?

Content is often transformed into written form before content analysis begins. For example, if you
are doing a content analysis of a photo exhibition, the analysis will probably not be of uninterrupted
visual shapes and colours. Instead, it might be about the topics of the photos (from coders’
descriptions, or a written catalogue), or it might be about visitors’ reactions to the photos. Perhaps
visitors’ comments were recorded on tape, then transcribed. For most purposes, this transcription
could be the corpus for the content analysis, but analysis with an acoustic focus might also want to
consider how loud the visitors were speaking, at what pitch, and so on.

Conversion into computer-readable form
If your source is print media, and you want a text file of the content (so that you can analyse it using
software) a quick solution is to scan the text with OCR software. Even a cheap scanner works very
well with printed text, using basic OCR software, supplied free with many scanners. Unless the text
is small and fuzzy (e.g., on cheap newsprint) only a few corrections are usually needed per page.
If the content you are analysing is on a web page, email, or word processing document, the task is
easier still. But to analyse this data with most text-analysis software, you will first need to save the
content as a text file, eliminating HTML tags and other formatting that is not part of the content.
First save the web page, then open it with a word processing program, and finally save it as a text
file.

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