Transcription

I mentioned that my notes are full of JPGs – newspaper clippings from the British Newspaper Archive. It’s a very important source of data in my line of research. But there is an obvious disadvantage to this: the info in the clips is unsearchable, because it’s just captured in JPGs. The British Newspaper Archive text recognition works, but the amount of fine editing required is too time-consuming. Something had to be done.

Now, Microsoft 365 offers a dictate function,  but  – I wondered if it was a company policy – I couldn’t use it. No problem, though: over the weekend, I had a series of Teams meetings ‘with myself’; dictated and used Teams to transcribe my clips; and pasted the transcriptions into my notes. Sorted! Moreover, it had the added advantage of forcing me to read every single word, and noticing a few more tiny details that I might otherwise have overlooked or forgotten.

Today (Monday) was a working day – well, a working morning, if I’m honest – and I decided that I really needed to pursue whether there was a better way. I got in touch with our very patient and helpful IT department, and multiple attempts were made this afternoon – it took quite a while – but we couldn’t get my microphone to work in Microsoft Word. Software was reinstalled – but still, nothing. I arranged another meeting for another day, and resigned myself to Plan A – the Teams ‘meetings-with-self’.

But it was niggling me, and I did a bit more googling and experimentation. Suddenly – and I don’t know how or why it happened – there I was. In SharePoint, looking at my weekend notes, and adding to them just by speaking. What’s more, a bit more playing around saw me dictating to the same document on my own very old laptop. It’s a twenty-first century miracle! Whether the reinstallation of software had anything to do with it, I don’t know – I can’t claim to have done it all by myself.

I may have spent much of my weekend, most of my non-researching afternoon and a little bit of this evening fiddling around, but it’s time well-spent. I do feel quietly proud that I’ve reached a solution to the problem, with or without assistance, and that this particular semi-retired Fellow still has enough nous to exploit technology appropriately.

To celebrate, I’ll listen to my favourite Leroy Anderson piece – The Typewriter. At the start of my career, I did the RSA Typing qualifications to Stage 3 – certified typing speed and all. How different things are with today’s modern technology!

Leroy Anderson – The Typewriter, conducted by Andrzej Kucybała

Cover Image by Richard Duijnstee from Pixabay