Alan,
Not all people work with audio tapes or need
time-aligned transcripts. I agree that those who
need this are better served with tools like
Transcriber than with tools like QDA Miner which
does not support audio file. If we choose to
support codings of audio files in the future, we
will of course explore all the possibilities and
will make choice accordingly, trying to offer the
best solutions we can come up with. Our content
analysis tool also does not support the content
analysis of videos, although there are some tools
that can be used for this (Willam Evans wrote an
article a few years ago on existing video
analysis software that could recognize faces and
extract text from videos). One could also say
that WordStat is in the dark age of video
analysis. But WordStat was not created to do video content analysis.
If you feel that Transcriber along with Onzeminer
fulfill all your needs, then the development of a
standard should be of no interest for you, but if
there are some tools in one of those QDA software
that you would like to use, then the options are
currently limited and the steps needed to move
from one software to another may be intimidating
for many users. Personally, as a developer, I
would be inclined to offer importation of XML
files produced by Transcriber or any similar tool
into QDA Miner so that those users would be able
to further analyze their data with our tools and
do things they cannot do with Transcriber. But of
course, if they believe they have all they need,
why should we bother to support it. I would also
prefer to deal with one file format (for example
an XML standard for all transcription tools),
rather than creating 5 different importation
routines for 5 different transcription tools.
This was the point I was trying to make.
Normand Péladeau
Provalis Research
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