In my last post, I thoughtlessly mentioned my irritation with requests to fund assistance with transcribing. I received two interesting comments that made me realize it’s a topic that deserves a bit more attention. Should graduate students plan to transcribe interviews themselves or to hire transcribers? The terrible answer, like everything else in academia: “it depends.” It depends on the scope of your project, your timeline, and the resources available to you.

I’ve transcribed myself and paid to outsource the job. A rational actor who can afford a transcription service will pay for it so they can spend their time on analysis and writing. I learned a lot when I transcribed my own interviews; I knew my data inside-out before I even started any systematic analysis. But I farmed out the job as soon as I had the money to do so. There truly is no glory in this kind of dirty work.

I’ve only reviewed proposals for small requests (<$10,000) aimed at supporting the “one-man-show” version of a thesis or dissertation. I make funding recommendations based on the project and not on the task – in other words, I’m inclined to give the proposals I support (the ones I go to the meeting prepared to put on the gloves for) what the student is asking for. A strong proposal convinces me that the research question is important and that study design is sound and feasible. In the successful proposal, the student has already convinced me that s/he is the expert, so I can trust that these students know what they need better than I do – transcription included. That said, in comparing two equally strong proposals where one asks for transcription assistance and the other requests support that is more directly tied to the collection of data, I’ve seen committees favor the latter and tend to do so myself.

This could be misguided. Students need support for finishing their projects as well as for starting them. Maybe these small grant competitions are biased towards data collection because they assume the recipients can get dissertation fellowships to support them in the later stages. I understand that things operate completely differently in the film world, where filmmakers can more easily get funding for post-production after they’ve emptied their own pockets and accumulated their own debt to gather their footage. Perhaps artistic and capitalist types like to invest only when there is a high level of certainty about completion, and scholarly organizations like to help get things off the ground.