People talk

I have this nifty little digital audio recorder that I've been using for my interviews. What I love about it is that I can just transfer the audio file from each interview onto my computer and then do the transcription.

The challenging part (or at least the very time-consuming part) is transcribing each interview. All of the interviews thus far have been between 45 minutes and an hour and a half, but it takes me at least 5 times that to get it all typed out.

I think it is an important process, though, because it forces me to really think about what my interviewee has said. I originally figured I would hire someone to do transcriptions but I'm very glad to be doing them.

The interesting thing is trying to capture and approrpiately punctuate the cadence and style of each speaker. I'm noticing a lot about how people talk - one person says "you know" constantly, another drops the "g's" of off all of their "ing" words and yet another starts every sentence with "And..." It's also interesting how many pronouns we use in every day speech. For instance trying to type out a sentence with a lot of "there's," "theirs" and "they'res" gets really confusing! Some people say "someone" where others say "somebody," and everybody seems to say "gonna" all the time.

After doing all of these transcriptions I am going to have to go through each and highlight the most relevant and salient points. Where possible I am going to try and pull in verbatim quotes from the interviews because most of the people I've chatted with have been really articulate and super smart.