Ethno/CA News: Resources
Transana: software for the transcription of video data
Chris Fassnacht and David Woods, of the Wisconsin Center for Education
Research University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed 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.
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:
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Import and view MPEG-1 videos.
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Easily create transcripts of the videos. Special symbols for Jeffersonian
Transcription are readily accessible, but are not required.
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Navigate through videos using several different mechanisms including a
precise Waveform image.
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Link frames in the video to positions in a transcript by imbedding video
time codes in the transcript.
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Automatically highlight the relevant portion of the transcript while the
video plays.
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Select analytically interesting portions of the video, which can be organized
into meaningful groups.
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Define keywords and apply them to portions of video.
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Search for instances of keywords and see the video clips to which they
have been applied.
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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, they 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.
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