But, it’s in academia where data transcripts shift from being more than just a business tool to a bonafide asset, driving discovery and enriching the overall learning experience.
For students and lecturers alike, professional transcription can help them skip over the time, effort, and energy they generally spend when reviewing topics for their research.
What is professional transcription?
However, before we dig into the major benefits of professional transcription for academic research, it’s important to understand what we mean when we talk about transcripts.
Simply put, transcriptions are text files that have been converted from audio or video.
In the academic world, transcripts help in qualitative research as they tend to capture conversations, consultations, interviews, and lectures.
Students and fellow researchers may transcribe seminars, conferences, focus group discussions, and one-on-one interviews.
Traditionally, transcriptions involve humans recording, listening, and writing down each word.
Most folks outsource this to third-party transcribing services.
However, if you have hours to spare and laugh in the face of dangerously losing your mind, not to mention your will to live, you could do it yourself too.
So, let’s move on to 5 particularly important benefits of professional transcription for academic research:
#1 Benefit: Accuracy
Accuracy is key in academic research. Scribbling down quoted stats in a lecture (hmmm, is that an “s” or a “5’?!) or listening while note-taking in an interview can be tricky.
Transcripts ensure that the facts and figures, let alone the topic being discussed, is captured correctly, cutting back the risk of mistakes or misinterpretation.
#2 Benefit: Speed
The tick-tock of time passing is a constant worry for academics.
Conducting fieldwork through videos, recordings, and hand-written notes, then clocking in more hours to make sense of it all can be both tedious and trying.
Truth is, having a transcription service or intelligent tool that can collate all your collected data gives you the time needed to better interpret and write up the research.
This gifted speed is invaluable for students and researchers who must meet tight deadlines for projects, dissertations, journal submissions, or presentations.
#3 Benefit: Effort
Alongside clawing back time, the use of professional transcription can curb the amount of effort you have to put into converting the copy yourself.
Specialized services can adeptly organize the 12 focus group discussions and 20 interviews in French and Spanish you conducted into polished and precise transcripts quicker than it would probably take you to find a fresh A4 copybook.
Much more than the mechanical task of writing down from a recording.”
In other words, by eliminating the mind-melting effort it might take you to assemble and write up all your data in a detailed way, you have the energy to fully focus on designing a much more meaningful and quality-led report or presentation.
#4 Benefit: Integrity
Basing your research on hearsay won’t get you far in the academic world.
While qualitative data does involve other people’s personal accounts and opinions, it’s having accurate and detailed transcripts of what was said, when, and possibly by whom, that enables your peers to evaluate the contributions of the research.
Having the care and consistency of the methodologies used scrutinized by others then encourages researchers to be rigorous in their work while upholding high standards of integrity.
#5 Benefit: Collaboration
The culture of transparency that’s created by making professional transcriptions of qualitative data widely available also champions greater academic collaboration.
Clear, accurate records of interviews, focus groups, or discussions, can be shared between researchers regardless of time zone and, because they can be transcribed into multiple languages too, without scholars worrying pertinent points will get lost in translation.
With everyone reading off the same page, so to speak, the research can be shared, and advanced, and new findings formed.
These are just 5 major benefits of professional transcription for academic research, though researchers themselves will likely have more.
If you need to transcribe spoken or recorded data asap, why not try our AI transcription tool?
You can upload your media file in any language and multiple formats and our system will quickly and accurately transcribe the content into text.
Of course, if you’re looking for someone to record your already transcribed text, we can help too! Just choose from our wide selection of voice over talent or get in touch.
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