TW for transcripts

#1

Hello everyone,

I would like to use TW for highly technical medical transcripts. These are some of the functions I would need:

  1. Document organized in the “classic” format such as a Microsoft Word documents based on headings and sub-headings but each paragraph should be an individual tiddler and the transcription or tiddler creation process should be efficient (not having to create each tiddler individually from sidebar and break the flow of the transcription). What is the easiest way to achieve this in TW?

  2. Each paragraph timestamped individually (hour and min). If I add a Timestamp field to all paragraphs is there a way to configure TW to increase the value automatically with each new tiddler so that I don’t have to do it manually? (minute 1, 2, 3 etc…)

  3. At the moment I am using a proprietary TextExpander software to save technical concepts as I am transcribing. Ideally I would like to use TW for this function as well. I am aware of ‘Preconfigured snippets of text’ in TW but this seems unsuitable for my purposes. Has there ever been a discussion about or has anyone thought of developing TW into a future rich TextExpander software?

All suggestions are welcome. Thank you.

#2

Hi!

I believe all three of your necessary functions are already covered or can be covered by tiddlywiki.

The amazing streams plugin can do #1; however, it might be overkill for your purpose. Streams is an outliner plugin, it is not meant for writing long documents. But you can use headings and cascade fold them too. See what I mean by checking out the demo site.

It is very possible to solve #1 and #2 without a plugin. (i know in theory, how to go about it, but not how to actually write the wikitext. That’s for the wiser people in this group).

In TW, if you go to Control Panel > Info > title for journal tiddlers, and set it to 0hh:0mm, whenever you press the new journal button it will create a tiddler timestamped with hh:mm. If it sees that another tiddler already exists with that title, TW will automatically add a 1 to the end. You could also set the “title for journal tiddlers” setting to “0hh:0mm:0ss” so that it also stamps the seconds.

This is a bit like #2 but you’ve already mentioned that you want to avoid using the new tiddler button in the sidebar.

#3 is covered by the amazing edit-comptext plugin. It gives autocomplete features. You need to download the plugin and drag this configuration tiddler too. Whenever you type << into the text editor, you will be able to autocomplete all tiddlers tagged with “$:stamp”, then when you hit enter, it will insert the body of that tiddler into the editor. I suggest to go to the plugin demo site to see how it works :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Although, I’m curious if you’re allowed to keep the transcripts in tiddlywiki, or will you need to export to them docx/pdf later on? There is a plugin for printing lists of tiddlers into a single document with a template, but it uses the browser print function. It is not intended for printing very formal, strictly formatted documents. This issue of using tiddlywiki for printing (specifically, academic writing) has been raised by @/mohammad before, I believe.

#3

Actually it was created with the use case of longer documents in mind where each paragraph/section should be a separate tiddler. Outlining is a secondary use case.

#4

@ps12 i am not clear about your timestamp requirement. If you creat a subtiddler for each section when edited that tiddler will get a created date and on edit a modified date gets updated with every edit. You could have a button to update a touch-date or a ediror toolbar button to insert a timestamp into the text.

Search in talk for headings there are a number of solitions for your first item.

Perhaps you need to define what text expander does before we can say how to do it in tiddlywiki.

#5

Thank you all for the replies. I have explored your suggestions.

  • Streams is adequate for my usecase, the only difficulty is with export. I don’t need docx/PDF export but I do need .tid export and I am having difficulty doing this when the document is structured with the Streams plugin.

  • I should have specified that the timestamps would not refer to current time but to the presentation I am transcribing. I need each paragraph to store the exact time (h and m) of the video they refer to so that in the future if needed I can revisit the corresponding part of the video and watch only the minute the corresponding paragraph refers to without having to watch larger parts and search for it. I can do this by manually adding a field to each paragraph and insert the time of the video I am at but this would be very laborious. I was hoping TW could help me out with automation. In general 1 paragraph is the equivalent of 1 minute of video. If from the start of transcription the value of the timestamp field would increase with one this would generally reflect the time of the video I am at. Later I could make manual adjustments to these timestamps if needed,

  • The autocomplete plugin suggested is adequate.

I have about 15 x 9h long transcripts to complete. My aim would be to use these as testing-ground for a larger educational project I am currently planning. While transcribing I want to save all technical concepts and create a small medical dictionary/encyclopedia. I would leverage TW’s epistemological power to organize this dictionary correctly: non-linearly, multi-categorically unlike most dictionaries do. Later I want to package both the transcripts and dictionary as plugins and create a plugin library.

If this first stage would work I would then use TW as a unified platform for all of my educational projects - not limited to medicine or transcripts only but spanning multiple disciplines and functions. This would be somewhat similar to how Soren used TW with GrokTW but developed into a complex interrelated library of dynamic books, educational resources, apps etc.

#6

There are a few ways you could accept entry of the time, of course it would be nice if you watch and pause a video and have the pause position stored with a click. This would require hacking the video playback.

Otherwise one can enter the value manually and then test the value are not out of bound eg 0-12 hours 0-59 mins.

Here is a little sample code to play with. Note it saves the values separately for performance and a click sets the time-stamp field. In your case I would be inclined to automate this further. perhaps having buttons for +10 mins or +30 seconds etc… Since one would rarely go back in time.

Hour {{$:/temp/time!!hours}} <$range tiddler="$:/temp/time" field="hours" min="0" max="12" default={{$:/temp/time!!hours}} increment="1"/> Minutes {{$:/temp/time!!minutes}} <$range tiddler="$:/temp/time" field="minutes" min=0 max="59" default={{$:/temp/time!!minutes}} increment="1"/> seconds {{$:/temp/time!!seconds}} <$range tiddler="$:/temp/time" field="seconds" min="0" max="59" default={{$:/temp/time!!seconds}} increment="1"/> 
<$set name=time-stamp filter="[{$:/temp/time!!hours}] [{$:/temp/time!!minutes}] [{$:/temp/time!!seconds}] +[join[:]]">
<$button>
<$action-setfield time-stamp=<<time-stamp>> />
<<time-stamp>>
</$button>
Saved {{!!time-stamp}}
#7

Perhaps have a look at the Streams Fusion addon, available along with Streams and other dependencies via the SQPL plugin library.

#8

Update: In the above example of mine, I did not make use of the actions available on the range widget.

#9

Thanks saqimtiaz. I want to keep the granular structure even after exporting. I have found a solution using Mohammad’s Tiddler Commander plugin.

1 Like