2007 LSA tutorial

[Heidi Johnson]

Dear Outreachers -

It will soon be time to submit a proposal for the OLAC tutorial at the

2007 LSA meeting. The meeting will be in Anaheim, California, Jan. 4-7.

 

Our 2006 tutorial, "A field linguist's guide to making great audio and video


recordings" was a great success, as we reported earlier this year, probably 

because the topics were so practical that lots and lots of people felt they 

needed to hear what we had to say. It also helped to bolster our authority
in

this area, which is desirable because there are a lot of know-it-alls out
there

still recommending vile things like minidiscs :-).

 

I would like to suggest that we do the second half of "A field linguist's
guide"

in 2007, focussing on the production of texts and databases that are
typically

used by linguists to support or produce structured texts, like Shoebox. We
have 

talked about doing a sort of "Meet the Archives" tutorial, but couldn't we
somehow

combine the two, by making sure that "new" archives - or newish members -
give

a presentation that introduces their archive and also says something helpful
about

making & using & preserving texts?

 

I've outlined the essential (in my view) topics for "A field linguist's
guide to making 

portable, preservable texts and databases" below. What I would really really
really

like to see is a tutorial that shows people how to use the software we
recommend

in a chain: set up your character set, font, keyboard; transcribe &
time-align with

audio/video; annotate and/or interlinearize; database to extract lexical
items, etc;

output something that can go into the archive. Most of the programs that
people

seem to favor are easy enough to use until you try to figure out how to
transfer the 

text you're working on from one to the other. That part can be maddeningly
frustrating!

I'm hoping we can collectively smooth out the kinks in the pipeline, so to
speak,

and present our audience with a truly useable suite of tools. 

 

So here's a possible outline, using last year's time slots as a guide:

 

1. 12:00-12:30

    Unicode: what is it, how do I find my character, what do I do if my
character

    isn't there?

2. 12:30-1:00

    Fonts and keyboard layouts: setting up your environment so you can type

    your nice Unicode characters in your applications

3. 1:00-1:30

    Transcription software: esp. inputs and outputs (Transcriber & Elan,
mainly?)

4. 1:30-2:00

    Annotation software: Elan, esp. inputs and outputs

5. 2:00-2:30

    Interlinearization: Toolbox

6. 2:30-3:00

    Databases: Toolbox, Excel, esp. saving in XML format

 

What do y'all think? Does this sound like something we could/should do?

 

 

Heidi

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