About audio file and corresponding transcription

[Veronique Gosselain]

Hi,

I've got interview audio files and corresponding transcriptions done before I started to use NVivo. I imported them in NVivo 9 in order to have audio file with its corresponding transcription. I asked for new row for each new paragraph, each corresponding to a speaker (2 speakers in a conversation). I then mergee several rows several rows together, and assigned a timespan from the corresponding audio to it.

The first problem was that the merged row went at the end of the transcription table. And at first I was a bit frightened to mix up the whole conversation!

This was kind of solved when I added the timespan to each newly merged rows, as the rows were sorteted according to time. I nevertheless wonder how not to mix up all if I would have a lot of rows to work with!

Now, at the end of a first part of the interview (a first audio file out of 3 for a single interview), I have a comment about the interruption of the conversation. I don't want to assign a timespan to this row but I do want to put it as the last row. This seems impossible to do!

Do you have any clue for both problems accountered?

Thanks a lot in advance!

[QDATRAINING Admin]

Hi Véronique,

This system is designed really for transcribing within NVivo and assigns the timelines automatically. If you assign them manually then you are right, NVivo will sort on the timeline. However, whereas it does appear to put them in the wrong order in "transcribe mode", once you close the audio file and reopen it in "normal mode", the timelines will appear in the correct order every time. To address your second question the only way you can ensure it appears at the bottom every time is to manually add a timeline for the very last section of tape. Then it will appear as you want to see it. However, the way I would do this would be to use an NVivo annotation instead. It will highlight the point where the interruption occurred but not break up the verbatim flow of the conversation. You will always know it's there because of the highlighting but you can switch on or off it's content at will. Also, any nodes or transcripts you print out (say to show your coding to a supervisor for example) will contain the annotation as an "End-Note". You can annotate the text or timeline or both. 

I should add that if you don't need to synchronize the audio and transcript then you can paste the text into the timeline and as there will be no timelines in the left margin, you will not loose the order of the conversation and you can code both the text and/or audio to nodes. The only benefit of having the timelines is that when you code a segment of text, you get the corresponding audio automatically. This may or may not be important depending on the nature of your data. 

I hope this helps but do come back to me for clarity on any of this and I will respond by return. 🙂

Kind regards,

 

[Veronique Gosselain]

Thanks a lot Ben!

It's perfectly clear. I'm sure I'll contact you later for another question when going on the discovering of NVivo! 😉

Véronique

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