dsf@allegra.UUCP (David Fox) (05/06/87)
A friend of mine is writing a book, and the research involves the following. She is transcribing a large number of tape recordings of interviews conducted over the past 15 years, in the African language Bamana. Then she is translating the interviews into English, so that a line of Bamana is followed by a line of English. So far this can be accomplished with a wordprocessor, although the accents necessary to transcribe Bamana may be a problem. Now comes the hard part. She wants to build a subject index as she goes along, so that later when she wants to find, for example, all the references to Women Sculptors, she can do a query and get a list of line numbers and interview references. It should be possible to merge these indexes. Can anyone give a realistic personal hardware and software setup which would make this as pleasant as possible? Is there software designed to do this? Please reply by mail, thanks in advance, David Fox allegra!dsf 201-582-5460
chuq@plaid.UUCP (05/07/87)
>She wants to build a subject index as she goes along, so that later >when she wants to find, for example, all the references to Women >Sculptors, she can do a query and get a list of line numbers and >interview references. It should be possible to merge these indexes. > >Can anyone give a realistic personal hardware and software setup >which would make this as pleasant as possible? Is there software >designed to do this? I'd consider using a good word processor such as Word 3.0x for the main transcription and a solid outline processor like Acta to do the index development. Using Acta has the advantage that you don't need to be in the WP to do work on the index, and that you can work on it at the same time as the main transcription but independently. You can also past the index into a WP later to do final cleanup. Acta has a lot of neat features that would help including topic sorting and such. chuq Chuq Von Rospach chuq@sun.COM [I don't read flames] There is no statute of limitations on stupidity