Tuesday 2 September 2014 — This is more than ten years old. Be careful.
A friend recommended a technical talk today: How to Design an a Good API and Why it Matters by Joshua Bloch. Looks good! It’s also an hour long...
For a variety of reasons, it’s hard to watch an hour-long video. I’d prefer to read the same content. But it isn’t available textually. For my own talks, I produce full text as part of the preparation (for example, the Unicode sandwich talk).
I’ve even transcribed other peoples’ PyCon talks: Stop Mocking, Start Testing, and Speedily Practical Large-Scale Tests. It was a good way to ensure I actually watched them!
People put slide decks up on SlideShare, but decks vary wildly in how well they contain the content. Some simply provide a backdrop, which is entertaining during a talk, but useless afterward.
Is there some way we can pool efforts to get more talks transcribed or summarized? Surely others would like to see it done? And there must be people eager to contribute in some way who could spend the time? Does something like this already exist?
I know the full talk, with the real speaker really speaking to me, is the best way to get their message. For example, Richard Feynman’s series The Character of Physical Law just wouldn’t be the same without his accent and delivery. But if the choice is reading a lengthy summary or not getting the message at all, I’ll definitely take the summary.
Or maybe I’m an old codger stuck in text-world while all the younguns just want video?
Comments
BTW, your www field parser doesn't like g+ URLs with a /+UserName in them.
One way to approach this (if you had a little money and a little time) would be to try chunking up the video and throwing it at amazon's mechanical turk. Someone would still need to review it, but if you had more than one worker do each segment, you could start by diffing the results of the different workers.
You still need someone to do a last pass on it, but it's a way to start.
MTurk is one way to go, but in this case your YouTube video already has subtitles/closed captioning. YouTube can do Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) which isn't always good, but in this case the subtitles are so good (with punctuation and attribution) that a human must have created them.
You can use Google2SRT to download the subtitles and then hack on them with pysrt. You could even output html that links to the exact location in the video where the line is said.
You might like the notes from this con organizer: http://composition.al/blog/2014/05/31/your-next-conference-should-have-real-time-captioning/
In addition to Mirabai's (she's my strategic partner) wonderful showing at !!con that was written about in that blog post, go ahead and look for #srccon and #strangeloop on Twitter for feedback about our (White Coat Captioning's) performance at those recent techcons. All you have to do is call us, and we'll try our darnedest to be there for you. ;)
Here's a link to an article that was written following SRCCON in Philly this past summer, to give you a feel for the fact that you are not alone in appreciating the live captioning and the searchable text following the conference: http://articles.philly.com/2014-08-13/news/52732917_1_tech-conference-dinosaur-dying-art#o4od38tIqRmXzGEz.01
It sure is a good idea to transcribe presentations as a collaborative effort. I did not come across any service like this. But, having a wiki like mechanism with a list of videos/presentations that people suggest to be transcribed would sure be useful for someone like me.
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