the benefits of ELAN

[Albert Bickford]

In theory one should be able to use any appropriate transcription system in one of ELAN's tiers.  That is, once you've selected a section of video, you can create an annotation for that stretch in a particular tier, and then put a transcription of the data in that stretch into the annotation.  The catch here is that the transcription must be representable using a font that ELAN knows how to use.  I'm not up on all the current technical details, but my understand/assumption has been that ELAN only supports transcription systems that are supported in Unicode (and, last I checked, there was the additional requirement that the Unicode characters you needed had to be included in one particular font).  Neither SignWriting nor HamNoSys have been added to Unicode, although there are various people who have given thought to how this might be done.  (In the case of SignWriting, it's not a trivial question what is the best way to do so.)    

Now, if there were some way to attach a graphic image as an annotation in ELAN, then this would provide a workaround, because the graphic could contain an image of the SignWriting or HamNoSys transcription.  This would provide a human-readable annotation, although it would not be searchable.  It would also probably be much more cumbersome than just typing in a transcription.

If one wants annotations in ELAN that can provide some of the functions that a transcription would provide, then I think the main options are:
-- a system of glosses that identifies the signs, as mentioned by Louise de Beuzeville in a separate post
- a transcription system that is representable in Unicode, e.g. StokoeAscii (an adaptation of Stokoe notation that is representable with ordinary ASCII characters)
- a coding system that represents just the phonetic/phonological/morphological details that you are interested in

Albert Bickford
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Gerard Meijssen 
  To: A list for linguists interested in signed languages 
  Sent: Friday, May 02, 2008 5:46 AM
  Subject: Re: [SLLING-L] the benefits of ELAN


   Is this where SingWriting / HamNoSys come in by associating it with a time slot in ELIAN ?

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/slling-l/attachments/20080502/b08abd04/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
SLLING-L mailing list
SLLING-L at majordomo.valenciacc.edu
http://majordomo.valenciacc.edu/mailman/listinfo/slling-l