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Discussion: Transcript refactoringReported This is a featured thread

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Semisonic
Semisonic
Transcript refactoring
Jan 21 2008, 7:18 PM EST | Post edited: Jan 21 2008, 7:18 PM EST
Hey, i thought it might be useful to make all the episodes' transcripts comply with the same quality standards. It's related both to the content itself and its formatting.
I have some ideas on that, and am trying my best to do my share of the job. Yet anybody else's help would be greatly appreciated.

So, my list of the attention points is following:

1. Character names. We better come up with a single standard about how to name each character in the transcripts. I'm talking about that because in Episose 16 Gray has been referred to as Anderson, which doesn't really look natural and IMO is uncalled for. So i'm just suggesting to refer to the people the same way they address each other the most of the time.
2. Grammar. All these "Theres", "tis" and other stuff like that are really looking ugly. I mean, i think it's true to transcribe it as closely to what we hear as possible, with "fellas", "gonna", "ain't" etc instead of their "official" variants, but whatever we write, we write 100% accurately. Otherwise it would be a pain in the ass to make all the transcript archive look consistent.

Okay, so since the message length is quite limited, my offer is to continue this list (using the same numeration, i.e. the next paragraph anybody adds to this list would be the paragraph 3, etc) by simply replying to the starting post. If anyone would like to discuss something already written by somebody else - you reply to the post the text in question was in, using the paragraph number as a subject. If you wanna discuss more than a single paragraph - please post as many replies as the number of paragraphs in question.
That way it would be much easier for everybody to look for the up-to-date agreements on every aspect.

Thanks people, i hope my initiative will gain some reception. Do you find this valuable?    
Semisonic
Semisonic
1. RE: Transcript refactoring
Jan 21 2008, 7:59 PM EST | Post edited: Jan 21 2008, 7:59 PM EST
3. Formatting. A lot of corrections i personally made were related to this aspect. So i think it's worth a detailed discussion.

3a) Marking up the environment description and the character actions
To make things better readable, i propose the following:

Environment descriptions - inside the parentheses, font bold (e.g.<b>(Outside the Townhall)</b>)
Character actions - inside the parentheses, font regular (e.g. (Jake and Hawkins are going inside))

Both these markup options take a fresh new line for themselves, with one line up and one line down empty (e.g.

(In the Med Center)

). The only exception is, the "dialog tags", i.e. the clarification of who's talking to who (e.g.: Jake: I'm in. (to Johnston) It's not gonna take us too long) - they stay in the same line the remark's taking place.

3b) Punctuation.

All the remarks should end with a punctuation mark. Unless the intonation suggests otherwise, it is a full stop ('.').
There're no spaces between the character's name and the colon (i.e. "Eric: Where's she?", not "Eric : Where's she").

That will do for now. Do you find this valuable?    

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