Measuring Events and Timing Speakers in Video and Audio Files

Researchers analyzing video and audio data sometimes need to make fairly straightforward quantitative measurements. How many times did each participant take a turn? How long did the animals in one group spend grooming vs another group?

During a recent Transana Webinar, two people had essentially the same question.  One asked how to easily time different speakers within media data, and the other asked how to time the use of different languages within her data.  They assumed they would need to put this data into statistical software or a spreadsheet so they could create reports with their results, but this is quite simple to do within Transana, creating a Collection Report using Quick Clips.

Here are the steps:

1. Load the Transcript you want to code.

2. Create a Keyword Group with Keywords for each of the categories you want to measure. For speakers, it might be “Teacher” “Student” “Researcher” and so on.

3. Collapse all Database Tree nodes except the Keyword Group with the keywords you want to apply. This helps make Quick Clip creation fast and easy by hiding everything else in the Data Window.

4. If you have an existing “Quick Quotes and Clips” (Professional and Multiuser) or “Quick Clips” (Basic) directory, rename it.  That way, you’ll have a separate Collection for all the Clips you make for this purpose when Transana automatically creates a new Quick Clips directory.

5. Make sure there are time codes at all of the transition points you are interested in in your transcript, if you haven’t already inserted such time codes.  (You can do this as a separate step, or you can add needed time codes as you go.  The important point is that you’ll need Time Codes at the transition points as you progress.

6. Change to the Keyword Visualization and create a Filter that only shows only the Keywords in the Keyword Group for the categorization you are planning to use.  (NOTE:  If you just created new Keywords that you haven’t used yet, they won’t show up on the Filter’s Keyword tab.  Just un-check any other keywords that show up and that will work.)

7. Starting at the beginning of the Transcript, highlight the first segment you want to code.  It might be the Teacher introducing the lesson, or the first speaker in German, for example.

8. Double-click the appropriate keyword, for example “Teacher” or “German”.  This triggers the creation of a Quick Clip that connects the highlighted segment with the chosen keyword.

9. Repeat these last two steps, highlighting the relevant segments and double-clicking the appropriate Keywords, to create Quick Clips for the entire Episode / Transcript pair.

10. When you are done with the coding, rename your Quick Clips Collection to identify its function, calling it “Speaker identification” or “Language use” or whatever you think is appropriate.  If you renamed an existing Quick Clips directory earlier in Step 4, you may want to rename it back to its original name for additional analytic work.

11. Now right-click the Collection you just created and choose the Collection Report.  Scroll to the bottom of the report.  There, you will see the Keywords you just applied, along with a count of the number of times the keyword was used and an indication of the amount of time for the segments included in each coding.