job of my dreams
2006-06-08 | 7:28 p.m.

Less than a week into my new job, I'm already amazed at the responsibilities I'm being given.

Two days ago, I had nothing much to do. Now I'm the lab's official getter-of-petty-cash-from-the-university, and I'm supervising a volunteer. Oh yeah, and this morning the lab coordinator referred to me as "expert" in the use of the lab's recording equipment. Never mind that two days ago, I couldn't figure out which way was up on the microphone.

I think this is a good thing. And probably standard operating procedure in a place staffed by a rotating crew of student research assistants who rarely stay more than a year (and in many cases only one term).

My primary job is going to be recording and editing speech samples to use in a couple of educational computer games we're building. My secondary job is transcribing speech samples.

The samples are from the same set of samples we did for our phonology lab assignment last year. The assignment was to transcribe, first orthographically and then using narrow phonetic transcription, a 5-10 minute sample from a child with a speech disorder.

So, by using our lab group and requiring us to cross-check each other's work and calculate our own inter-rater reliability, she got a bunch of her transcription done. Verrrrry sneaky.

But my issue is this- we were given over a month to complete that assignment. If I'm going to get through all of the samples that the prof wants done by the end of the summer, I'm going to have to average one a day. Oh yeah, and I have to do a mean length of utterance and type-token ratio for each sample, too (which, to be fair, will add five minutes, tops, to the process just as soon as I learn the coding conventions used in the SALT software).

Heh ... job of my dreams.

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