Transcripts
One of the first steps after recording a meeting or an exchange with people is to produce the transcript, namely the verbatim transcription of the statements recorded. It should be noted that, a summary translation may suffice, depending on your project, but this implies that statements may possibly be unintentionally distorted. This work, which will make it much easier to process the content for deriving meaning from statements, can be quite time-consuming. Indeed, unless one writes very quickly, the recording must constantly be paused to complete the notes and rewinded to make sure that nothing is missing. In short, sufficient time must consequently be planned.
Summary
Once the verbatim transcription phase has been completed, it may be useful to identify the relevant statements and remove those that are not. This makes it possible to preserve the essence of the recorded discussions and to condense them into a much smaller working document. The summary can take various forms, but the most common are structured or schematic text.
If the intention is to compile the recordings and transcripts within an archive, this summary can also serve as a presentation text of the recordings.
Thematic focus of the content
In historical research, it is often a matter of supporting thoughts or ideas with quotes or sayings. Once the transcript is complete, certain recurring themes will emerge. In order to address these thematic clusters, it is recommended to use colour coding to associate various interventions to a select thematic group. For example, it is possible to highlight all the statements dealing with the settlement of communities with the same colour. These thematic groups can then be grouped together by indicating the themes that link them together.
Indexing and classification systems
Indexing is a technique for classifying documents that will later be reused and analyzed. A simple way to do this is to compile keywords from the thematic process into a chart and to associate the documents that address them. This saves time when searching for documents related to a particular topic. The larger the document database, the more useful this tool will be.