Introduction and Overview

Transana is designed to facilitate the transcription and qualitative analysis of video and audio data. It provides a way to view video, create a transcript, and link places in the transcript to frames in the video. It provides tools for identifying and organizing analytically interesting portions of videos, as well as for attaching keywords to those video clips. It provides a mechanism for searching for portions of analytically interesting video by keyword and by combinations of keywords. It also features database and file manipulation tools that facilitate the organization and storage of large collections of digitized video.

More specifically, it allows users to:

Import and view MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and AVI format videos. (Transana can also be used with MP3 and Wave audio.)
Easily create transcripts of the videos. Special symbols for Jeffersonian Transcription are readily accessible but are not required.
Navigate through videos using several different mechanisms including a precise Waveform image.
Link frames in the video to positions in a transcript by imbedding video time codes in the transcript.
Automatically highlight the relevant portion of the transcript while the video plays.
Select analytically interesting portions of the video, which can be organized into meaningful groups.
Define keywords and apply them to portions of video.
Search for instances of keywords or combinations of keywords and see the video clips to which they have been applied.
Transfer video files to and from a Storage Resource Broker (SRB), a computer system with massive storage capacity.

Transana was originally created by Chris Fassnacht. It is now developed and maintained by David K. Woods at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison.