Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/03/14/a-young-marine-in-wwii-set-out.html
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This would make for a great Mel Gibson movie! AMIRITE?
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The topics from the Futility Closet are fascinating, I would love to know more, but I will not follow the Patreon link and support anything until transcriptions are available. [/rant]
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I’m a pretty fast typist and it would take me at least four hours to transcribe a half hour episode. Sharon and Greg say the show takes about a fulltime job worth of work a week. I’m first in line to foment for captioning but withholding funding because they’re already not making enough money to pay for transcriptions seems like a lose-lose situation.
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I’ve seen the biopic that they made about Guy Gabaldon. Not bad, actually.
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Can we put the two together and explore her erotic origins while being
overly preachy? Nothing like mixing mythical Amazon woman erotica and
proclaiming Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior.
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I’ve been thinking about this a bit, and it seems like a good project for machine transcription. Google voice already does an ok job transcribing voice mail messages, and it would seem like podcasts would lend themselves better due to generally being recorded under better circumstances.
At the very least, getting a rough transcription would reduce the initial workload, which could then be edited.
At its best, I could imagine a system that would correctly recognize speakers and produce transcriptions with them correctly attributed.
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Did anyone else first read that as “Wonder Woman’s erotic organs”?
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[Credit: Hark, a Vagrant]
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You’ve piqued my curiosity. Why the rant about transcriptions? Are you thinking accessibility for the hearing impaired? or is there something else?
From the show notes:
http://www.wtj.com/articles/gabaldon/
I’m almost in tears of joy and sorrow reading this story. Private Gabaldon was a shining example of the best of the USMC.
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I cannot speak for @roomwithaview but personally I cannot stand podcasts with lots of infos and complex(ish) topics and concepts, but would love to read them in my own speed and time.
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I wouldn’t use “cannot stand” but I’m occupying the same spectrum as you.
With the exception of Dan Carlin/ HH, because he speaks so slowly and rephrases A LOT.
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Thanks for that. Makes sense, though not something I would have thought of. I listen to Futility Closet, The British History Podcast, Stuff You Should Know and many others while my eyes are otherwise occupied - layout editing, walking in traffic, washing dishes, etc., and sometimes do find that I need to back up and re-listen to a section, but when I have time to read, my face is stuck in a book (or on BoingBoing…)
I listened to this particular episode on my way home from work last night and at one point had tears streaming down my face as I approached the train station.
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I meant to respond to this two days ago. 
I’ve been having a time (not the good kind).
I’m not sure what’s available for auto-transcripts but I use Youtube’s auto-captions by necessity and the quality is about as low as live TV (like really live TV). It’s better than nothing but I’m not sure it would fit everyone’s needs in terms of an audio replacement.
I’m thinking of it more like a rough draft that can be edited afterwards, rather than a entire replacement for human transcription, at least until the technology matures well enough.
Something like Digital Democracy might lead to more general purpose tools for this:
I’m not seeing anything about what technology they’re using on the site, even after creating an account, unfortunately.
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Besides it actually being easier for the author to just post the content they’re about to read from, and thereby gain valuable hours of their life not having to audio edit and re-record the bodged bits, here’s a bunch of other reasons.
Most people, especially me, read much faster than they hear.
If the topic’s interesting the author can embed links or I can copy & paste into a search engine for more info.
If it’s really interesting and I want to send it somebody I can copy & paste & edit a few snippets and not waste their time with the part they don’t care about.
If I myself feel strongly about something and wish to, oh, let’s say respond on a BBS forum about it, I can, again, copy & paste the part I’m responding to for easy context to the forum reader.
This “use multi-media for optimum SEO” crap needs to die in a fire!
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This. I have to admit, my usual reaction to a Futility Closet episode that interests me is to research the topic on the net myself and try to find some good articles. Some things are just better considered via text.
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