Smart Pen for Interviews and Other Uses?

This post on the blog Digital Ethnography sent me to the Livescribe site to look at their smartpen.  It records audio.  In conjunction with coded paper in a notebook, you turn the recording on and off.  It also transfers your notes to your computer as images and OCRs (?) them so you can search them.  I figured they would make their money from the paper,  but they say you can print your own.  (Of course, you have to give up your favorite pen and notebook.)

I haven’t investigated this in detail — am posting this in the hope that a reader either has or will investigate further and let us all know, in more detail, what it does and whether it lives up to its promises.

Bookmarking Pictures

The NYTimes writes about sites for social bookmarking of photos. I’m not interested in the social aspect; I’m interested in being able to easily save photo images and locations, and annotate them. Most “normal” bookmarking doesn’t allow me to cruise thumbnails to see what I’ve marked. To save images to, say, use for presentations, I can copy them onto local storage and lose the metadata, including the sources; I can use Photoshop to add the metadata, but that takes  time and effort; or I can save the image and/or URL in text file with my annotations. What these sites do is to allow you to have a page with thumbnails, URLs, and tags for your saved images. They don’t, as far as I can see (without joining them), allow me to annotate these images. They allow one to embed a feed/badge, so others can see, not the images you take, but the images you bookmark. The sites the NYTimes writes about:

• Fffound: by invitation only.
• Vi.sualize.us: a firefox extension. Click on an image you like and voila.
• We heart it : bookmarks videos and YouTube. You can bookmark photos and they’ll appear on a page of images you’ve bookmarked. You can annotate via comments (but they’re public). Easy to save images via a bookmarklet.

None of these are quite what I need, because they’re specifically designed to be social, so people can see what others bookmark (and they can see yours).

Cheap and Fast Transcriptions?

Haven’t tried it myself but a friend just sent me this:

http://waxy.org/2008/09/audio_transcription_with_mechanical_turk/

Basically, you cut your audio file (e.g., interview recording) into chunks (so it’ll get done in parallel, rather than in sequence; faster); write a description of the task and how much you’re willing to pay; decide how long you want the job to be posted; and send it off.  You pay for it out of your Amazon account.

Here’s the site, which matches up workers with people who have work to be done.

If anyone tries it, please tell us how it goes!

Also useful for other kinds of work that can be off-shored on a person-to-person basis.  Well, it doesn’t have to be off-shore, but that’s how you’ll get it done cheaply.

Multimodal Publishing

I’ve recently been introduced to Sophie, software for creating “books” that incorporate text, images, video, and audio:

Sophie is software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment. Sophie’s goal is to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of people and institutions and in so doing to redefine the notion of a book or “academic paper” to include both rich media and mechanisms for reader feedback and conversation in dynamic margins….Funded by grants from the Mellon and Macarthur foundations and the University of Southern California, Sophie is free and entirely open-source.

So far, I’ve only played with it a little. Friday I’m going to see the products of an archeology class that has used it — will write more then. The most serious limitation is that it requires its own reader, so it cannot (at this point, anyway) be used to produce “papers” on the web. But it looks intriguing. Well worth checking out.

Tool for Coding Video

Just saw a tangential reference to this on a visual studies listserv, and wonder if anyone has tried it (or wants to try it and post their evaluation).

Transana is software for professional researchers who want to analyze digital video or audio data. Transana lets you analyze and manage your data in very sophisticated ways. Transcribe it, identify analytically interesting clips, assign keywords to clips, arrange and rearrange clips, create complex collections of interrelated clips, explore relationships between applied keywords, and share your analysis with colleagues. The result is a new way to focus on your data, and a new way to manage large collections of video and audio files and clips.

Used to be free, now $50/user/computer. (Not clear to me if it’s 2 x $50 for 1 user, 2 computers).

Reference Manager 11 Update – Still Doesn’t Work; Do Not Buy!

I spent half a day on the phone with Reference Manager’s help people who had me try everything they could think of. They couldn’t figure out what was going on so they just kept having me try things — most of which I had already tried on my own.

The last guy said he would take this to the team meeting and get back to me — and never did. [When are customer service operations going to learn that the deafening silence with which they follow up on their "promises" to customers is even more annoying than the initial problem? I would expect a follow-up, an apology for their inability to solve the problem, and an offer of a refund.]

So now I’m trying to get my money back, since this whole exercise in upgrading has been a pointless waste of time. The money is minor compard to the time I’ve spent on this — but damned if I’m going to let them just shrug their shoulders and give up without so much as an apology.

The moral: DO NOT upgrade RM10 to RM11 — the improvement was going to be minor, and it has turned into a pointless time sink.

UPDATE 2/24/08: I spent 2 hours on the phone with their most experienced tech support person and he can’t get it to work, either. He has no control over refunds, but told me to tell Sales that I worked with him. Sales says return it to Amazon — but of course Amazon won’t take back used software. In short, software companies don’t seem to have to stand behind their product. You buy it, you’ve got it. And, since this company Thomson Scientific has bought out the major competitors — EndNote and ProCite — they have monopoly power and I can’t take my business to the competition.

It’s not the money, it’s the idiocy of it — they’ve spent probably 5 hours on the phone with me, worth much more than the $100 the software cost. Not to mention the value of my time. (Yes, I should have bailed on this long ago, but it’s the classic debugging problem — let’s try ONE MORE thing.)

Another Option for Recording Telephone Interviews: Grand Central

Again, thanks to Cool Tools:

Grand Central from Google. It does a variety of things, but what’s of interest for researchers is that it can record calls:

GrandCentral lets you save all or parts of a call. Just press the number 4 to turn on and off recording – both parties will hear an announcement notifying callers that call recording has been initiated or stopped. Listen to your recording in your GrandCentral inbox or by phone when you check your voicemail. …You can forward recorded messages just like you do voicemail forwarding.

And it’s free, at least for now.

My postings on related tools: cellphone diary studies, a microphone type device and another web-based service, and another microphone device that works with a phone.

 

Software Failures – Never Update Working Software!

My new rule: if it’s running, don’t update it!

If you are running Atlas ti, do not, do not, DO NOT update it to 5.2. It has failed on both my machines (home desktop and home laptop) and the fix that tech support sent doesn’t work. SoI’m trying to finish two articles over the break using my Atlas ti coding and I can’t get into my data.

Similarly, if you are running Reference Manager, DO NOT update from 10 to 11. It only works partially, and exactly the update that I wanted (to no longer have to key in over again the text to search on when inserting refs into an article, e.g., the author’s name) — that’s exactly what doesn’t work, and it broke the entire function. So I CAN’T key in the name and search on it from within a document. I have to leave the document, go to RM, find the reference, select it, and go back to the document to insert it. Again, tech support has been unable to fix this.

So time that I should be spending on my research is being wasted trying to fix broken software.

Cellphone-Based Diary Studies: Clever Way to Collect Voice Data

Call-in, cellphone-based diary studies can be a powerful way of collecting data about people’s activities. In diary studies, subjects record their own activity over time. But people often simply fill out the diary at the end of the day, if they remember to do so at all. So some researchers have experimented with having people call in and leave a report when they do the activity of interest, which is especially useful now that most everyone carries a cellphone.

The problem, of course, is — how do you collect the data? Do you devote a phone line to this? What do you do when you don’t have — or need — that degree of resources? How do you set up a temporary voicemail for people to call in their reports?

Virginia Lingham figured this out for her 214 project: she used www.snapvine.com. It’s designed to collect voice comments on a social networking site, among other things. And it’s free.

How it works (this is what I understand from their website and what Virginia said– I haven’t tried it). They give you a number that people call and leave messages. (I don’t know what sort of prompt it lets you leave.) You can then dial in and listen to the comments. It says “you can listen, delete, record, reply” — I’m not sure how the recording works. If you want, it’ll send you a text message every time a comment is left.

If anyone tries it, please leave a comment here (in text; sorry) telling the rest of us how it worked out for this purpose.

Recording Phone Interviews

In addition to the Olympus accessory for recording phone interviews that I wrote about before — an earpiece that connects to your recorder and records everything it “hears” on the phone — Cool Tools writes about two others:
–Radio Shack’s Mini Phone Recorder, which also attaches to a phone and a recorder
–A web-based service called RecordMyCalls : you call their 800 number, then the number you want to call. They record the call, store it, and make it available as a downloadable file, for 20 cents per minute and $5 per month. Could get pricey fast, but useful to know about.