Yesterday saw the first Q&A of the Lib Dem leader since entering government. We covered it on Lib Dem Voice with a live tweeting session, Stephen Tall’s excellent live-blog and we also recorded it for posterity.
Because quite a lot of what was said might be useful for campaigning purposes, and because in the fullness of time we will want to hold Nick Clegg to account for his answers, I asked BOTY-nominee and Total Politics List star Caron Lindsay to mobilise an army of volunteers to transcribe it from our slightly ropey recording.
Caron and her volunteers have done a fabulous job, and their transcription is available here on Google Docs.
Q&As from past conferences
It is of course, not the first time that Nick Clegg has made himself available to delegates to answer questions and reassure conference members that all is well with the parliamentary party. Here are two more occasions from the archive when LDV recorded a Q&A for posterity:
March 2010: defending his remarks to a newspaper about Thatcher. Helen Duffett reports for the Voice.
September 2009: a recording of a Nick Clegg Q&A from conference.
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6 Comments
Seriously – that was painful. Next time can the person not recording sit next to a typist and keep the interference from mobile signals to a minimum (if it was the recorded on a phone then I recommend using the airplane mode).
Still, it was quite interesting.
Douglas
Well, you’ve got all sorts of fun. If you sit in the audience, you get rustling, chairs creaking, people whispering comments to each other. If you plonk the recorder by our telly in the office you get the typing noises. There’s nowhere in the conference where there aren’t a dozen mobiles within 10 meters. It would be great to get a clean feed off the sound board somewhere but we haven’t figured out a way to do that yet. There was one fringe where we were given a CD recording from the board – but barely anyone here has a CD player since we’re all on sub-notebooks now, so that will have to wait until I get home for a proper play.
It’s a long way from ideal, I acknowledge – but as far as I can tell we’re the only people doing it, and the only people trying to make sure our coverage, including audio, of previous conferences hangs around for as long as possible.
Sorry if that sounded critical – I was just amused when I couldn’t tell if I was hearing myself tying too loudly or it was on the recording.
If you have a linux machine you can download the BBC Parliament footage (with nice clean and crisp audio) and then use some basic software to strip out the audio which can then be used to type the transcript. But I am a geek so I probably got more satisfaction from doing that than the actual typing……..I real need to grow up.
The full roll of honour for this – and believe me, as Douglas said, there was blood, sweat and tears in this reads,in no particular order as they say on Strictly:
Douglas McLellan
Nikki Thomson
The Spiderplant
Katie Sutton
Stephen Glenn
Chris Mills
James Shaddock
They are truly all brilliant.
It took me back to my days as an audio typist at St Thomas’ Hospital trying to decipher the words of Consultant Orthopedic Surgeons, only this time the subject matter was more enjoyable 😉
It took me back to audio typing training for my RSA Exam. A skill I have never used since. Surprised I could still do it.