Hey, I know you're not running the CR transcripts project, but since you've been talking about it some I was wondering if you knew how critter transcriptions are being used now that they're taking donations? It sounds like the service the donations are going towards does pretty much what fan volunteers would be doing, so I'm a little confused. I'd ask the people in charge but I don't use twitter and wasn't sure how else to reach them.
(for the other anon who was wondering, the current incomplete transcripts are here - click the tab of the episode you’d like, then click the link on the episode name at the top of each spreadsheet)
Yeah, I’m a little curious as well. I’ll try to go into how I think it works, and maybe @crtranscript could jump in with corrections? The impression I’m getting is that there are some episodes blacked out from the spreadsheet that can’t be helped with (and the most recent bunch of episodes that aren’t there at all) because they’ll be done by the paid transcription process.
For whatever it’s worth, I’d love to see these transcriptions reach a sustainable level, both in terms of the time it takes to caption an episode and in terms of slowly weaning off the need for paid support; otherwise, it’s an endless time and money sink that’s never gonna get caught up. If it were up to me, it might look a little something like:
Use the paid transcriptions to only do the most recent episode every single week. New episode comes out, it goes straight to the paid service, every single week. So, for instance, the paid service would start at episode 81, and the next episode paid would be episode 82.
Someone would work exclusively on editing and posting the final transcripts on as close to a consistent weekly basis as humanly possible, with the understanding that a “pretty great” transcript across multiple recent episodes is endlessly better than a “perfect” transcript across one archived episode.
If the money’s getting thin, assign/hire critters to do full episodes instead. But I suspect that having more concrete returns every week would increase support.
Each individual episode would ideally be captioned within two or three weeks of its airdate, but the transcribe/edit/post process would be staggered so that a new caption went up every week.
Having the new episodes covered means the entire backlog is a fixed amount that will stop growing and will be more attainable as a goal by the community at large.
I know I’d be a lot more inclined to do some serious transcribing—and I think I could complete an entire episode in a weekend—if I knew for sure how it was going to be used, and that there was a fixed endpoint.
Once the backlog catches up to the start of paid transcripts, which could admittedly take a long time, you can stop using the paid service. Setting the entire critter community on a single episode every week? With careful and consistent organization (including having mods who would page folks who take more than a few days with their five-minute segments), it would certainly be possible to have the new episode transcripts up within a week or two, again keeping in mind that near-perfect and posted beats out perfect and delayed by a month.
Have one week devoted to transcribing, and then while the next week is devoted to transcribing the next episode, edit and post that first episode.
Stagger it like that and you stay “caught-up” even if it takes a couple weeks for each episode.
More frequent and clearer advertising of this service would help pull in more volunteers.
And there you go. It would take some time, maybe up to a year, but eventually I think it would be really possible to have captions on every single episode in the backlog, with new captions up every single week, only the one or two most recent episodes uncaptioned at any given time.
A project like this kind of has to be sustainable in the end, or else it will just keep losing money and time and motivation.
Anyway. I’ve clearly overthought this, but that’s how I’d go about it, and I’d love to help make it happen if that’s any option at all; as someone with many Deaf family members and friends, this is a project that’s especially near and dear to my heart.
I don’t know. I’d love to hear thoughts from other folks whose names I’ve seen come up a lot in the transcription process: @pansychubb? @theargentumlupine?
