Guided Tour - Working with Clips

Transcription is a very useful way of starting to work with raw video.  It helps researchers get a handle on what is contained in the video collection as a whole, is very useful for easy navigation through the video, and helps begin the process of focusing on some details, the analytically important ones, over others. For some researchers, it is a sufficient basis for their analytic process. Other researchers, however, prefer to go beyond transcription in their analytic endeavors.

In Transana, you can identify a short segment of a longer video as being analytically interesting by making it into a virtual Clip. The clip is the primary analytic unit in Transana. Clips that are analytically similar can be gathered together into Collections.

Transana provides two different ways of creating clips to support different analytic approaches and to facilitate different parts of the qualitative analytic process. We'll discuss the first of those here, and the second when we talk about keywords.

Creating clips is as easy as highlighting the text between two time codes in a transcript, clicking to indicate that the selection should be made into a clip in a particular collection, and naming the clip. (See the Creating Clips ScreenCast for a demonstration of how clips are created.)

In this approach, the clip itself can be thought of as evidence, with the collection in which it is placed describing where in the theoretical model that piece of evidence fits. As your theory changes, grows, and evolves, you can copy or move clips around.

For example, in looking at an advertising campaign, we initially noticed that there were two types of arguments being made, logical arguments and emotional arguments. As we collected more examples of each type of argumentation, we developed a system of sub-categories and sorted the clips we already had into these sub-collections. It quickly became clear that there was far more emotional than logical argumentation being used, and that it had a much more complex structure.

At any point, you can double-click a clip to see the video it represents. It is often very useful during the process of categorizing and sorting clips to be able to review all of the clips in a collection as a group. One way to accomplish this is to make use of Transana's "Play All Clips" feature to play the clips one after another. This way, it is easy to see if the clips all hang together in a single grouping or whether the clips need to be divided into sub-groups.

This allows you to easily stay connected to your source video at all stages of analysis, as the original video is always just a click away. Furthermore, locating a clip back in its original context only requires a single click, so you can easily review what occurred just before or just after the segment you selected previously. When working with video and audio data, context can often be very important.