By: Sid Smith
"A linguistically competent human should be able to accept the challenge of listening minutely and getting it down" Not sure what you mean, unless it's that reporters should have lightning shorthand....
View ArticleBy: Mark F.
Does the ability to record interviews make transcribing them fast enough to justify doing it as a routine practice? Finding a quote in a sound file isn't easy at all. Time spent doing that is time that...
View ArticleBy: Sid Smith
@ Mark F. "Does the ability to record interviews make transcribing them fast enough to justify doing it as a routine practice?" Yes, yes and yes. What could be a bigger priority than getting the quotes...
View ArticleBy: Clayton Burns
http://www.blinkx.com/videos/mark+liberman This tool could be of some use for political speech. Searching audio files should not in theory be difficult. I am willing to concede that recording and...
View ArticleBy: Sid Smith
"Once you have a recording, many programs and apps allow you to increase playback speed by up to a factor of 2 or 3, which also makes locating relevant regions faster" I still have the cassette...
View ArticleBy: Clayton Burns
–I don't know of any decent integrated systems (at least none suitable for the uses we're talking about) for using speech recognition to segment and search for content. But such things will be...
View ArticleBy: tpr
Mark, the embedded audio widget for the "When that kid gets the- gets the honor roll" is linked to the wrong audio clip. [(myl) Thanks. Fixed now.]
View ArticleBy: Martyn Cornell
Clayton Burns: "I think that there is some exaggeration about how hard it is to listen and write down what people say." Having done this - taking down verbatim peoples' speeches at meetings, in...
View ArticleBy: Will Keats-Osborn
Interesting and relevant anecdote: A self-described "human tape recorder" with "a talent for mentally recording lengthy conversations," Truman Capote thoughtfully included in his book Portraits and...
View ArticleBy: Jonathan D
Sid Smith didn't appreciate Mark Liberman adding the interpolation about deadlines in the comments above, but at least it was clear that it was Liberman's summary. It would be much worse if that...
View ArticleBy: maidhc
Today's San Francisco Chronicle has the following direct quotation in a featured article: "There's a way in which some violinists can slide or use certain kinds of bravado to emulate what an opera...
View ArticleBy: John
Any chance reporters here (or elsewhere) are using prepared texts given to them by campaigns, as they do with the State of the Union, for example, and Romney read it wrong?
View ArticleBy: James Joyce on Writing: “write dangerously” | The Coming of the Toads
[…] Menand questions whether what we read in Power's book are the actual words of Joyce or the "gist" of a conversation that took place decades prior to the book's publication. Would Menand have the...
View ArticleBy: Rob
The problem I have as an editor is that often people don't say what they mean. They might use the wrong word, or mess up the grammar, or - increasingly these days - mangle an idiom. Where it's obvious...
View ArticleBy: Brad Daniels
It seems to me that technology has already come up with a solution that is perfect for journalists who like to use written notes: I have a pen (a Livescribe Echo) which works with a special notebook to...
View ArticleBy: Unquotations and How to Avoid Them | Book How-To
[…] explores the topic further in follow-up articles here and here. Commenters offer a few possible explanations for inaccuracies—transcribing recorded […]
View ArticleBy: The Language Log scolds journalists for "approximate quotation" (again) |...
[...] unquotations“, 8/3/2012“More unquotations from the New Yorker“, 8/4/2012“Approximate quotations“, 8/11/2012“Quote approval and accurate quotation“, [...]
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