1. Introduction. InqScribe is one of a growing number of tools for transcription of
digital audio and video. Developed by Inquirium and available commercially, InqScribe
is available for both Windows and Macintosh platforms. This review deals with version
2.1 and examines the functions of the software, as well as where InqScribe might fit in the
ever-expanding range of annotation tools now available for those involved in language
documentation.
According to the developer’s website, “InqScribe is primarily designed for transcription, annotation, and light analysis work. For more complex analysis work, many researchers turn to other applications, including Excel, NVivo, or a custom database application.”1
For more complex linguistic analysis, we can certainly add the annotation tool ELAN2
to
this list, but in the daily grind of language documentation we all have transcription tasks for
basic analyses that need to be performed frequently (and if possible, quickly); InqScribe
has, in my experience, been extremely useful in carrying out these kinds of tasks. Although
there is no evidence that it was designed for linguistic applications, InqScribe is designed
for a broad range of uses, and the website’s list of its “wide variety of applications” includes “social scientists analyzing video of ethnographic data.”3
An attractive additional
feature of InqScribe is that it also allows for the quick and easy conversion of a transcript
into a subtitled movie.
2. USING InqScribe. Depending on what your goals are in a transcription task, the kind
of simplicity offered by InqScribe can be a limitation or an advantage. For example, there
is no layered structure as in ELAN and therefore no need to define features such as tiers and
their dependencies, nor to deal with abstractions such as “linguistic types” and “controlled
vocabularies.” On opening InqScribe, the process is uncomplicated—the user is prompted
to navigate to a single media file (only one media file can be linked to an annotation) and
the console appears with the video screen in the top left, a timeline and media controls
underneath, and the annotation area which links to the media file on the right (Fig. 1). The
video display size can be changed either through preset percentage sizes in the view menu
or by using a window splitter control, which allows the user to resize the video by using
the mouse to drag it to the desired size. On the downside, there is unfortunately no waveform display, so tools such as ELAN,