Transcript Structure

The page opens to the Overview. Here you will find a list of contents, a list of books and articles referenced in the class, a list of Plotinus citations (if any), a list of Sabian degree symbols referred to (if any), a list of diagram names referred to (if any), and notes about the audio files and the transcribing process. 

Clicking the Main Document tab takes you to the document (for example, the transcript). The participants are listed by their initials (if it can be determined). We haven’t provided a key to the initials in order to respect some people’s preference for privacy. Anthony Damiani is “AD.” 

The transcript can be searched for words and phrases, and it’s not case sensitive. Also if you happen to view a transcript that belongs to a class series, there will be a link that appears on the overview page that will take you to that series if you want. Go here to learn more about class series.

Some documents have diagrams embedded in them (this is often the case with student notes of a class). The diagrams associated with class transcripts and papers are usually under the Diagrams & Appendices tab.

At the bottom of the page is the audio player. The tracklist tells you how many parts there are (roughly these correspond to the number of audio cassettes used to record the class), and you can toggle to whichever part you want. You can move the slider to go forward or backward. You can listen to the audio while reading the transcript and stop the audio when you want. This is particularly useful if you want to stop the audio playback in order to view a diagram referred to in the transcript.

Most classes were tape recorded by a student on 90-minute cassettes that had to be flipped at 45 minutes. Most classes went longer than 90 minutes, so a new cassette had to be inserted after 90 minutes. But the discussion continued while the tape was changed, so there are slight gaps when the tape had to be flipped or a new tape inserted.

The audio quality varies. Many are quite good. However, in the summer, the air conditioner was sometimes on and it degraded the sound quality. The volume may seem low at one point and then high at another. Voices in some parts of the room come through better than in other parts. The audio quality of some but not all the files have been improved by a professional sound engineer.

The Download PDF tab is self-explanatory. The PDF will be a single document, assembled with the overview first, next the main document, and lastly the diagrams and appendices.

This tab appears only if there are diagrams or appendices associated with the main document. If you open the Diagrams & Appendices tab, you will find many of the diagrams referred to in the transcript.* You can scroll through them to find the one you want to see. There may also be appendices that contain relevant student notes or partial transcripts that help fill out the class (for example, the partial transcript may cover a part of the class for which we no longer have any audio files). 

If you click on a diagram, you will see a slightly larger image of it. When you close this tab, you will be back to the window that was open before you clicked the diagrams and appendices tab. Thus you won’t lose your place in a transcript if you want to see one of the diagrams being referred to.

* To learn how we determined which diagrams to include in a transcript, see Choosing diagrams.