Text Is More Tractable Than Video or Audio

Visual cues (gestures) and audio cues (tonal inflections) contain valuable information. But these high-dimensional features are notoriously difficult to analyze systematically due to normalization problems and inconsistent signal quality.

Compared to audio/video data, text is:

• More extensible
• Less ambiguous
• More widely consumed
• Reliably time-stamped (when derived from transcription)

This is why sophisticated qualitative data pipelines convert everything to text as early as possible. The information loss is real, but the tractability gain is larger.

The practical implication: if you’re building an analysis pipeline for video or audio data, invest heavily in your transcription layer. Everything downstream depends on text quality.

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