1. Open CLAN.
2. The first thing you need to do is to tell the program where the data is that you would like to transcribe and where you would like the transcript to be saved. This is what the program calls working. Remember to keep all related files (video, audio, ELAN files, CLAN files, etc.) within the same folder.
3. In the editor, which looks like a standard word processor, you need to introduce commands such as those below before you start the transcription. These are instructions to help the program understand everything you type in later (i.e. your transcript):
@Begin
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You always start like this
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@Languages:
eng
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In this case, we are telling the program that the
media file is in English (eng). If you have Catalan, Spanish, etc. you can
also indicate it (cat, esp..). You can leave this part out, but it might be
useful for analyses later.
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@Participants:
MAR Maria, JOR Jordi, SSS Students, XXX Unidentified, PPP Pause
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Assign pseudonyms to all the participants in your
data. You can add to this later, but you will need to then select Tiers → Update (see below). Remember to include pauses as a
participant!
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@Options:
jefferson
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Here you tell the program which transcription system
you are using (e.g. Jefferson, CA..., see the section about this below). You
can leave this part out, but it might be useful for analyses later.
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@Media:
test2, video
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‘test2’ is the name of the file, in this case a
video file, that is being transcribed. Here you put the name of your file. If
we had an audio file, we would write ‘@Media: test2, audio’.
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4. Save the file in the same place as the media you are transcribing (i.e. working).
5. Click on Tiers → Update. That way, the program assigns a combination of keys to each participant, which will save us time while transcribing.
6. Go to Mode, and select the option Sonic mode. A video player opens up and a soundwave is created. The soundwave will help you enormously as you transcribe.
7. To start transcribing, select a part of the soundwave by clicking down on your mouse button and dragging the cursor. You can normally tell by the soundwave when someone is talking or not. The selected section will play automatically. If you want to listen to the selected section again, click ctrl+mouse click (Windows) or cmd+mouse click (Mac). If you want to change the selection, click and drag our mouse again.
8. Tell the program whose turn it is that you want to transcribe (i.e. who was talking) by using the combination of keys that were assigned in step 5 (ctrl+1, ctrl+2, ... in Windows; cmd+1, cmd+2, ... in Mac).
9. Type in what you hear, as though you were typing in a standard word processor, without using any punctuation signs, capital letters, etc. (see the section on transcription conventions below).
10. After you transcribe your selected section, you need to associate what you have written (transcript) to the precise point it occurs at in the audio and visual data. This is done by inserting a bullet, by clicking crtl+i (Windows) or cmd+i (Mac).
11. We also transcribe silence in exactly the same way as we transcribe speech, but by selecting the section of the soundwave where nobody is speaking. We set the ‘participant’ as pause/PPP by using the corresponding combination of keys. Calculate the duration of the pause by clicking on the black bar with the date:
So that it looks like this:
‘W’ is the duration of the fragment you see on your window at present. ‘C’ is the temporal location of the cursor. ‘D’ is the duration of the current selection, which in this case, is the duration of the pause. Round it to the nearest tenth of a second. If the pause is less than 0.2 seconds, we normally mark it as a minimum silence (see transcription conventions) as it is impossible to be so precise. Your transcription should now look something like this:
12. Continue with the rest of the transcript. Once it is finished, you need to tell the program. Do it by writing the following on a new line:
@End
13. When you finish, to listen to what you have transcribed and make the changes you want, click F5 (the highlighting over the text doesn’t move) or F6 (you can follow your transcription more easily as the highlighting moves down the text in synch with the audio and video data).
