Answer To A Question About Transcribing

IT'S NOT ANY GREAT DISCOVERY on my part, it's no kind of an achievement.

You open up a lecture on Youtube and find that you want to understand it better than just listening to it passively will allow. 

You slow it down by clicking on the little cogged wheel icon and choose a slower playback speed.  I almost always go with .75, or 3/4ths of the play-back speed.  Slower than that and sometimes I can't understand what's being said.

You click to have closed-captions (if those are available) understanding that machines are stupider than your ears are and have no comprehension of what the text means.  They often give a deceptive translation of individual words.

You click on the little icon next to the "close" icon at the very top right hand of the screen to take it out of "full screen" mode  and push the side together so the window you have Youtube open in occupies less than half of your computer screen. 

I open up the simplest text editor I have on my computer.  Usually I use Featherpad but have used Leafpad too.  The simplest ones with the fewest non-essential features work best for me.  

I reduce it to less than half of the screen as above and  put it on the opposite side from the window that Youtube is in, so they don't touch.  I use this to type in the first draft of my transcription. 

DON'T FORGET TO NAME YOUR FILE AND TO SAVE IT FREQUENTLY OR YOU'LL GET DISCOURAGED WHEN YOU INEVITABLY LOSE YOUR WORK WHEN YOU CLOSE IT OUT OR THERE'S A POWER OUTAGE.  That's my experience.     I've found that for first drafts the simplest, least complicated text editors are better than a word processing program though I copy and paste the final first draft into one of those to refine the text.  Remember to name your copy and to save it frequently.

I play the slowed lecture video and stop it when it's as far a long as I trust my memory to get it typed into the text editor.  I check my memory with the closed captions, noting frequently how stupid machines are and that "artificial intelligence" is not intelligence nor is the nonsense that calls what they do that. 

REMEMBER TO CHECK YOURSELF AND TO SAVE YOUR WORK FREQUENTLY AS YOU GO ALONG.  Can't say that enough.

I've found that this is hard work and I'd never try it for more than half an hour at a time. If you do much more than that you won't get as much benefit in understanding what's being said and thinking about it, which is the goal of going through this.  Though it is, actually, enjoyable if you like learning and thinking about new ideas. 

If you're as brazen as me and figure a cease and desist might come in your comments but probably won't, you might share it with the rest of us.  Though if anyone who authored anything I do this with asked me I would respect their request that I take it down.   

Most of what I do this with is for my own study.  It's especially useful when you are going through what a geek says about technical stuff.  Even the best of those such as on the excellent and wonderful and invaluable Explaining Computers and Frugal Computer Guy Youtube channels is more useful if you do some slow learning to get as much of the slow wisdom from it as you can.  Repeated listening doesn't get you as far.  And it's better than listening to the same old pop music and TV crap you saw decades ago.  That's numbing, not learning.