My Latest Thoughts On Transcripts

[trouble]

[My self-appointed to-do list is getting really really long. Is anyone shocked by this?]

So, meloukhia (who is awesome) put up another post at Feministe today that is a video with description and transcript.

I'm not terribly interested in the video (I'm not really into the visuals in videos unless they're fanvids) but I'm really interested in the transcript.  meloukhia does an awesome job on both the transcript and the description, and transcripts are, as you know, a Thing I Care About.

I view this as the Platonic Ideal of a transcript & description.  As someone who has no desire to watch said video, I know what is going on in it.  It's really awesome and well done.

I admit - because transcripts like this are very difficult to produce, I have posted fewer videos than I had in the past.  I'm not a big video person, so I'm sure no one has noticed the lack, but I'm aware of it.  I know that, in order to allow everyone to participate in a conversation about a video, I need to do a lot of work, and I'm lazy.  Rather than exclude anyone, I just don't much talk about videos anymore.

I don't really feel this is a loss.

There are videos that I think really do need a wide-ranging audience.  I'm in the (strangely going slowly) process of transcribing a few videos right now, and I've found an awesome partner who has agreed to do the visuals for me.

I know we often talk about working together to do transcripts, because everyone knows they're time consuming.  I don't like the way we talk about this, though.  Like we're somehow doing the Poor Folks Who Can't Deal With Video A Favour.  No we're not.  We're acting like they are part of the audience.  They are value-added.

I'm all for doing work around transcripts - I also regularly email creators of videos asking for transcripts, and I have instructions on how people can put up captions on YouTube videos and I do think that a google group or DW-community of folks willing to do transcripts - partials, in tandem, or on their own - would be useful.  But I think these are all necessities, not extras.

I should poke around DW and see if folks would be willing to do a transcript-share community.

Comments

[trouble]

Me personally? Since I don't really care about music all that much (I am strange that way), I'm not really concerned deeply about the type of music being played, so I had never really considered that as something that should be included.

This is obviously an oversight on my part, and one I do think you're right to bring up.

I don't know what meloukhia's thoughts on that are, but I will out next time I talk to ou.

[naraht]

Do let me know what you two conclude about it. I was thinking about doing a post on the topic, since I have a lot of thoughts about how one might go about describing music, but what would be useful to me as a hearing reader/listener might not be at all useful from the point of view of a hearing-impaired or deaf person. Do you think there might be resources somewhere already?

[meloukhia]

Oh, also, transcripts are not just for Deaf and hard of hearing folks, but for people who can't (or don't want to) watch video for all kinds of reasons. So, a question I try to ask myself when transcribing is 'what would I want to know about this if I couldn't or didn't want to watch it?' 'How can I describe this in a way that someone who has not seen it would understand what is happening?' (For example, just providing lyrics so that Deaf and hard of hearing people know what's being sung isn't helpful for blind folks who can't watch, or people behind content barriers who can't play the video at all.)

[naraht]

That's definitely a good way to think about it.