Written by Hannah Dang with support from the DAC team
Hello fellow crows ~
My name’s Hannah, and I’m one of the Disability Access Collective’s (DAC) student blog moderators! Recently, I was tasked with transcripting our interview with UConn Professor Kimberly Bergendahl from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) about their role in UConn’s Accessibility Fellow Project (click the following links for the interview write-up and the transcript). As this was the first time I was put in charge of a transcript, I thought it would be entertaining to give our subscribers a sneak peak into the behind-the-scenes work that goes into transcribing and publishing a transcript from an interview. Let’s get into it!
During our virtual meetings, we (with the interviewee’s consent) video-recorded the interview through Zoom. In the background, we had a closed captioner write and log subtitles into a saved document as the other blog moderators and I asked our questions. Not only do we save the video and audio files, we save the discussions in the chat feature in Zoom in PDF downloads. By the end of the interview, our head blog moderator and closed captioner processed and downloaded their files, and then sent them to the whole team in a Google Drive folder. By the interviewee’s leave, the team divided up the workload. That was when I volunteered to fix the transcript.
Then came my active contribution. Because the captioning files I’m sent are not reading-accessible nor completely error-free, I spent the majority of my time fixing the grammar mistakes from the transcribing machine. Upon receiving the recording and multiple copies of caption files, I opened up an online document and copy-pasted a copy of the captions into it. Connecting my laptop to my BlueTooth speaker, I played the recording and then reviewed the transcript’s draft to gauge its accuracy and fix any errors. To be transparent, the part I hated most about the experience was not being allowed to play music as I worked. As someone who loves to play lo-fi beats or one of my playlists in the background as I study or complete work, transcribing becomes a bit tedious.
Because the interview was a little under an hour long, reviewing the transcript took longer than I expected. Along the process, I encountered several instances in which the recording either lagged, causing the audio to become distorted, or the dialogue was purely indecipherable. Luckily, I resolved the matter by communicating with the team. In addition to fixing the errors, I was required to fix the format to make it reading-accessible. This includes specifying the speaker at certain parts of the transcript, testing out fonts, removing the time stamps, spacing and paragraphing the gaps in dialogue, and transcribing the bits of inaudible parts. By the time I finished, I sent my final draft to the team and had the members review it. I heard their suggestions and then promptly applied them to the transcript.
As a final step, I reviewed the transcript for the third time with Madison, the moderator in charge of the write-up, and then sent the transcript and informational back to the interviewee (Professor Bergendahl) for publishing consent. Soon thereafter, we received the “go-ahead” signal from Professor Bergendhal, and we communicated to the team about the transcript’s “completed” status for publication. From there, the transcript was ready to be copy-pasted into the website.
There you have it! A crow’s eye view into the world of a blog moderator. Glamorous, isn’t it? It was a pleasure to interview Professor Bergendahl and get a glimpse into her experience with UConn’s Accessibility Fellow Project, her college experience as a Political Science major and with UConn’s Center for Student with Disabilities (CSD), and her current career. Because the other DAC moderators took me under their wings, I learned a substantial amount about being an efficient transcriber and the rewarding workload it provides. For next time, I plan to study hard and improve my skills to maximize the quality of my work.
Disability & Access Collective 