[Sigia-l] FW: A New Tool for Transcription and Analysis

[Derek Rogerson]

New FREE video/audio analysis tool you might find use for in usability labs:



-----Original Message-----
To: Multiple recipients of ETHNO
Subject: A New Tool for Transcription and Analysis


Ethno Hotline Folks,

The Wisconsin Center for Education Research would
like to make available a free software tool that could
be useful for Ethno Hotline researchers.  I and a
colleague, David Woods, have been developing a
program to assist in the transcription and analysis
of video data.

It's called "Transana," and it is freely available at
www.transana.org.  It's an 80 MB download, mostly
because it includes sample video data and transcripts
to use in the accompanying tutorial.  It's available
as both a single-user application and a multi-user
version which allows a local workgroup to share access
to a single dataset.  The website also contains a
discussion board for support issues, as well as problem
report/feature request tracking.

Transana is designed to facilitate the transcription
and analysis of video data. It provides a way to view
video, create a transcript, and link places in the
transcript to frames in the video. It provides tools
for identifying and organizing analytically interesting
portions of videos, as well as for attaching keywords
to those video clips. It also features database and
file manipulation tools that facilitate the organization
and storage of large collections of digitized video.

More specifically, it allows users to:

- Import and view MPEG-1 videos.

- Easily create transcripts of the videos. Special symbols
for Jeffersonian ranscription are readily accessible,
but are not required.

- Navigate through videos using several different mechanisms
including a precise Waveform image.

- Link frames in the video to positions in a transcript by
embedding video time codes in the transcript.

- Automatically highlight the relevant portion of the
transcript while the video plays.

- Select analytically interesting portions of the video,
which can be organized into meaningful groups.

- Define keywords and apply them to portions of video.

- Search for instances of keywords and see the video clips
to which they have been applied.

- Transfer video files to and from a Storage Resource Broker
(SRB), a computer system with massive storage capacity


While Transana was created specifically with conversation
analysts in mind, it also has features that make it
useful for other forms of qualitative interactional and
language-based analysis.

Currently, Transana only runs on the Windows operating
system, but as time and resources allow, we plan to make
it cross-platform (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux) and
open-source, so that it will be not only free (as it
is now) but also freely available as source code.

(Transana is a product of the Digital Insight Project
(www.wcer.wisc.edu/digitalinsight), and it is being
developed with funding from the National Science
Foundation through the National Partnership for
Computational Infrastructure at the San Diego
Supercomputer Center and the TalkBank Project at
Carnegie Mellon University.  Development is
headquartered at the Wisconsin Center for Education
Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.)

Thank you for your consideration.

Chris

Chris Fassnacht
Associate Researcher/Director of eServices
Wisconsin Center for Education Research
University of Wisconsin-Madison