I noticed today in WisconsinEye’s Morning Minute email that they have introduced a transcription tool for their archived programming.
According to WisconsinEye, “the online transcription tool allows users to read and follow a transcript while watching any on-demand video. Users can search the transcript and jump to searched words, click on links to time codes within the transcription page, as well as download the entire transcript.”
I got kind of excited when I read this. Does this mean now I can download full transcripts of floor sessions, hearings, committee meetings, etc. for research purposes?
Hmm – not quite. There’s a big banner on the site that reads: “Transcriptions are machine-generated and may not have been proofread or corrected. Transcriptions are reference, search and assistive in nature only and are NOT an official transcript of this video.” Darn.
I did a little spot-checking to see how accurate they actually are. Yeah, it’s about what you’d expect from a machine-generated transcript. Here’s a sample of the transcript from the November 6th Assembly Committee on Government Accountability and Oversight meeting.
For comparison, here’s a video clip of that exact spot in the meeting which I generated using the WisconsinEye clipping tool.
So although the transcript tool isn’t quite as cool as I was hoping, it still is a nice addition to the site. It’s a big step in making the content accessible to hearing-impaired users and it allows all users to keyword search and jump to the exact spot in the video. Nice job, WisconsinEye. Keep it coming.