Transcript validation notes

Resources for creating a simple web interface for validating tabular transcript data.

I still see a lot of transcription and coding done in excel, with metadata stored in an info worksheet, transcription and coding in another transcript worksheet. Each row is tied to a timestamped utterance or speech act. So, there are columns for the timestamp and utterance along with additional columns for whatever annotation is needed (e.g., coding for syntax, semantics, gesture, context, etc.)

Anyway, we want to avoid parsing excel files. Let Google Drive / Sheets do this for us.

• Discover Drive - online course showing how to build applications with the Google Drive API

• Google Spreadsheets API

With a published sheet, we can retrieve a JSON feed from the Spreadsheets Data API.

• simple demo
• overview and comments

However, we may want to avoid publishing our transcripts. Alternatively, we can use a node client with authentication built-in to access the relevant worksheet data for validation.

So, what we want is a simple single-page web app that …

• allows a user to upload an excel file
• uses the Drive API to convert this file to a gsheet
• uses the Drive or Spreadsheets API (or browserified node client) to retrieve the parsed sheet data as JSON
• tries to validate the returned sheet data
• provides feedback to the user if it finds any invalid data

File uploads are straightforward with the File API.

Keep it simple!