[RNLD] ELAN tiers and types

[Aidan Wilson]

Thanks Andrea, and Tom, Jeremy, John, Sally and Joe for your advice and your 
template files. I think the best way forward for me now is to try to mamnually 
edit my eaf files and nest the tiers, as creating new tiers and trying to 
re-enter the annotations I think will be too long and painful.

-- 
Aidan Wilson

School of Languages and Linguistics
The University of Melbourne

+61428 458 969
aidan.wilson at unimelb.edu.au

On Thu, 13 Sep 2012, Andrea L. Berez wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> Entering the conversation a bit late because of time zones, but I have some ELAN training materials that anyone is welcome to download and use.
> They (attempt to) explain the relationship between types and tiers and have exercises for building files with increasingly-complex tier structures.
> The materials are a few years old and based on an earlier version of a ELAN, but the basics have not changed.
> 
> https://www.sugarsync.com/pf/D7795324_2102134_63719
> 
> HTH,Andrea
> --
> Andrea L. Berez
> Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics
> University of Hawai'i at MānoaDirector, Kaipuleohone UH Digital Ethnographic Archive
> Technology reviews editor, Language Documentation & Conservation
> http://www2.hawaii.edu/~aberez
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 12:57 AM, Honeyman Tom <t.honeyman at gmail.com> wrote:
>       Hi Aidan,
> 
> The short answer is Nick Thieberger recently posted to this list a collection of templates produced by Andrea Berez:
> 
> http://www.rnld.org/software
> 
> or
> 
> http://paradisec.org.au/elansampletemplates.zip
> 
> You could use these and modify them.
> 
> Alternatively, I create tiers in the following way:
> 
> First, here is an etf template file that I use to start a new transcription:
> 
> https://www.sugarsync.com/pf/D138718_8778877_6506503
> 
> To change it for your needs, open it in a text editor and search for all instances of "Tom" and replace with the name of the person entering
> the data (e.g you). Replace "XXX" with the name of the language you are transcribing, and "YYY" with language of your translation. Replace
> "English" with the language you are making utterance level comments in, if it isn't English. Save the file.
> 
> Now replace all instance of "Unknown" with the name of the person you are transcribing. Save a copy of the file in a templates folder
> somewhere and rename it with the speaker's name. Repeat the process for each speaker you are transcribing. In this way I amass a template
> file for each speaker that I have transcribed, and so when I want to start a new transcription I simply import the all the relevant template
> files in with my audio file and hey presto away I go.
> 
> This template provides per speaker tiers for transcription, translation and comments. The transcription is time aligned, while the
> translation and comments are nested underneath. There is also a single tier for time-aligned comments (i.e. general comments that don't align
> with speakers' utterances).
> 
> I use tier names that are compatible with exporting to toolbox. "tx" is from transcriptions, "ft" is for translations, "cm" is for comments.
> The @ + participant name bit at the end of each tier name is a trick to aid exporting to toolbox. If you're not exporting to toolbox, then
> rename these as you like (e.g. make them more verbose), but remember you can't have separate tiers for each speaker that have the same name,
> so it's best to use a similar strategy of including the speaker's name in the tier name.
> 
> Naming and establishing tiers and types consistently across a corpus is really important once the corpus grows. It will allow you to search
> across the corpus and to narrow your searches to just one tier, or type, using the extremely powerful "Structured Search Multiple EAF". Say
> for instance you wanted to limit your search to a particular speaker, you would search for values within a particular tier across multiple
> files. Say you wanted to search in your translations for all speakers, then you would search within the type "YYY translation" (where YYY is
> the language you entered). Always establishing tiers and types using templates will really help to ensure the consistency which will enable
> these kinds of searches.
> 
> For your particular needs I would create two more tiers using the same per-speaker naming strategy, and create separate types for those tiers
> as well, both using the stereotype "symbolic association" (this is really important for the nesting). Then save the file as a template, and
> create all the individual versions for each speaker.
> 
> I translate in both Tok Pisin and English, so I have separate tiers with separate types for both of those. I also have a "tidied text" tier
> which is less representative of the original, but, for instance replaces accidental code-switching (at my consultants' request), and tidies
> up in other ways. I have a close phonetic transcription tier for when I transcribe word lists, again with a separate type. I only mention
> these extra tiers because it really helps to add them from the start, as going back and adding them afterwards is a pain.
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> Cheers,
> Tom
> 
> 
> On 12/09/2012, at 6:06 PM, Aidan Wilson <aidan.wilson at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>
>       Hi all,
>
>       I'm having immense trouble with a collection of transcripts I'm building at the moment. I have never been successful in creating
>       hierarchies of tiers. Ideally, I want to have a hierarchy like this:
>
>       -[initials]
>       –transcription
>       -morpheme gloss
>       -free translation
>       -action
>
>       for each participant. In reading through the manuals and so forth, I've created linguistic types like 'group' (for the outermost
>       parent tier), transcription, morpheme gloss and so on, but what's happening when I create my tiers is that by trying to select a
>       parent tier, the 'linguistic type' pull-down menu disappears and the 'add' button goes grey. It only allow me to create tiers (or
>       change existing tiers) if I don't plan on nesting them, it seems.
>
>       Has someone got a link to instructions, or even better, a working template than I can reverse-engineer?
>
>       What I'm hoping to do is go through my transcripts with a text editor and manually nest them by editing the xml (unless I can
>       figure out how to retrospectively nest them), but I need to know the structure of the eaf file.
>
>       This is bringing me to tears, as it were.
>
>       --
>       Aidan Wilson
>
>       Dept of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
>       The University of Melbourne
>
>       +61428 458 969
>       aidan.wilson at unimelb.edu.au
> 
> 
> 
> 
>