Because you are handling data containing the voices of (multiple) people, your data is considered one of the most sensitive kinds of data. For this reason, data uploaded to HPC to perform the transcription should not be left idling on HPC. As soon as you are aware that the transcription has been performed, you should take steps to download the results from HPC to your UG work environment and to remove all traces of the data from HPC.
There are three main areas that you need to clear to secure your data:
Once all three of these locations/files are downloaded and cleared from HPC, you are ready for a new round of transcriptions.
Last but not least, and independently of the sensitivity of your data, HPC is a computing cluster and therefore only intended for the short-term storage of mutable data. In order to ensure proper performance, data should not be stored long-term in the cluster.
The files contained in the folder input need to be removed before you can run a new transcription. This is because the script is designed in such a way that it will transcribe anything that is located in the input folder. If you do not remove old audio data, Whisper will transcribe that audio again, potentially running out of time to finish the transcription job. Removing audio that has already been transcribed also reduces the risks of a data leak and is considered good practice.
Before removing the audio files, we advise you to first check if the transcripts are acceptable. Should you have to run the transcription again with a modified script (i.e., to force a language that Whisper did not automatically identify), then having the audio still on HPC will save you time.
If the transcripts are what you expect them to be, however, then the audio should be removed promptly. Please consider doing a brief check of the transcripts, rather than going through them line by line. You can check the details of the transcription in your work environment directly later on.
The files contained in the folder output can be removed at any time, even after a new transcription job has been launched. We do advise you, however, to clean your HPC environment completely, before running a new transcription.
The transcripts created by Whisper come in five different formats:
txt → This is most likely the format you will want to work in. It is a simple text format, with only the transcription recorded and minimal line formatting done.srt → This file is useful if you want to display subtitles in a video containing the audio you transcribed.vtt → This is the Video Text to Track file. It contains the text but also the time stamps of the transcription.tsv → This is a simple Tab Separated Value table. It is mostly equivalent to the txt file.json → This file is machine readable and can come in handy if you need to pass the transcription on to a different program.
Finally, there is one last file that needs to be removed before you are done cleaning your HPC environment. In your whisper folder, next to the script the interface created, there is a file called:
slurm-<jobID>.out.
This file is created by HPC when you launch a job, and it is tagged with the jobID displayed when executing the script. It is used to record what happened while the job was running. Apart from the information on the status of the job and how it was completed, the actual transcription is also recorded here. This means that the transcription of your audio can also be read by displaying this file. In order to ensure that all data related to your audio is removed from HPC, this file needs to be deleted as well.
Note: If you were curious, SLURM stands for Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management.