Social scientists are increasingly using video cameras as a tool for data collection as it allows them to go back to certain interesting moments and study them in much greater detail than would be possible based on written notes or memory. So how do you find those important moments in your hours of video footage? Of course it’s possible, to do it from your memory of when in the sequence of events it happened or because you noted down the time. But I found this method somewhat laborious and I wanted to find a way of “synchronizing” my field notes with the video footage.
I would have loved to use the solution provided by a new free software called Chronoviz which integrates all kinds of time coded data, including my Livescribe Pen. The problem is, I am on Windows and Chronoviz is only available on Mac. But if you are on a Mac, you may not have to read any further and head directly off to the Chronoviz website and try it out. (And feel free to share your impressions in the comments below!). For the rest of us Windows folks (or for the Mac folks who might want something much more simple than Chronoviz) here is how I just solved this challenge for myself: it’s a simple Excel spreadsheet (three to be precise).
When you open it, it looks like this:
As you can see, it’s still under development, but the basic features should work. Here is how you use it: enter something (it doesn’t matter what) into the green field (E2) and hit enter at the same time as you start your camera(s). You will get something like this:
Now you can take notes in the blue-white striped table and whenever you enter an event (in the Events column), the time of the event will be logged in the Time column and the Video Timestamp column will show the respective time code on the video (i.e. the time passed since the recording started).
As you will notice, the time for an event is logged only after you wrote something into the event-column and hit enter. So if you intend to write a lot about a particular event (and therefore will hit Enter only after the Event is long over), you might want to adjust the logged time manually. But please do this using the column “Manual time” on the right. These Time and Timestamp columns should not be touched at all, they are entirely automated and messing with them will probably mess up your log.
Instead of changing the time manually, it might be easier to develop a habit of hitting enter after writing the first few words and then navigating back to complete the entry. Or you could use the “Event” column for a short description and elaborate in the Notes column. In that case you will hit Tab instead of Enter, which will also create a time log.
And there is another way to adjust the logged time. You can also set a permanent offset in the Config-tab (another spreadsheet underneath the main one). For example, if you set the offset to 20 seconds, the time logged will be the current time minus 20 seconds. I find this useful because when you eventually use the time code to jump to the corresponding moment in your video, you will not have to manually move back another bit in order to see the moment that actually triggered you to take note of what happened.
The rest is pretty self explanatory. You just go on taking your notes (don’t forget to make sure that autosave is enabled while you’re in the field. Otherwise you risk losing a day’s work.
Once you have logged your events, the next step is to import them into whichever CAQDAS package (Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software package) you are using to analyze your videos. I use Transana, so that’s what I will describe and that’s what the Export format of the Eventlogger is designed for at the moment. But it should be easy (if not unnecessary) to adapt it to another software like NVivo, MaxQDA, or Atlas.ti.
So here are the steps to get import the logged events into Transana:
- Hide the Column C (“Time”) by clicking on it’s header (and thereby selecting it), right clicking it and selecting hide. (If you want to keep the “real” times for each event in your transcript, skip this step). To unhinde it again, select column B and D, right click and select “Unhide”
- Select the area of the table that contains your data as shown in the screenshot below, copy it, and paste it into a new Transcript window in Transana (or any Text document that you can later import as a transcript). If you are using a text editor like Word which understands the formatting of what you paste, make sure you “paste as text”, cause you don’t want a table.
- In Transana, you then use the “Text Time Code Conversion” tool which will convert the time stamps from the Eventlogger into Transana time stamps and link them with your video. Now you can easily navigate to each of the special moments you observed in the field, simply by clicking on where you describe that moment in the transcript.
Surely, the export function could be more luxurious and I have fiddled a bit with automatically importing the data into a Word document (via a Mail merge directory), but so far this solution is very context dependent and therefore not fit for sharing. And the advantage of the copy&paste solution is that not much can go wrong. So go ahead and give it a try. Let me know if it works for you.
You can download Eventlogger_v0.9 here.
Some more little things to consider:
- The original Eventlogger file is an .xlsm file (excel file with macro) but for some reason WordPress won’t allow me to upload xlsm files, so I change the ending to .xls. If you open the file as it is, Excel will give you a warning message that the file content does not match the file type. If you just accept that an allow Excel to open it, will work fine. But you can avoid this by just renaming it to .xlsm before opening it.
- As you can see in the Screenshot above, the size of the stripy table is somewhat limited, but don’t worry. The table expands automatically as soon as you start writing into the first row below the table. (UPDATE: I just realized that this auto-expansion is currently not working. So you need to expand the table manually for the time being.)
- When you open the Excel file for the first time, it will warn you that it contains a Macro and it will block this macro from being executed until you give it the permission. You don’t have to activate the Macro, but then you will have to manually change your Excel settings to “Enable iterative calculation” by going to Options => Formulas => Enable iterative calculations (see here with pictures). The Macro does this for you automatically. Nothing else. Without this setting, the whole thing won’t work.
- The timestamp format that Transana reads is h:mm:ss.sss. Note the dot before the sss. If you open the Eventlogger and you see a comma or something else instead of the dot, that is because your computer’s “decimal symbol” is set to something else than a point. To change this, in Windows 7, you need to go to the control panel => Region and Language => Formats => Additional Settings => Decimal symbol. I suggest you change also the “Digit grouping symbol” in order to avoid confusion. (But this has nothing to do with the Eventlogger.)