gem diaries

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Peter, Frank, and Info-CHILDES,

  I agree with Frank that Peter's idea about collecting diary "gems" is excellent.  I think that putting this information into CHAT files has several advantages:
1.  CHAT can be reduced easily to XML and XML can then provide full facilities for searching over the web through all sorts of programs.
2.  The basic information needed for CHAT is also something that we would want to include for these data.  We would want the date, the situation, the child's name, and such.
3.  CHAT also makes a clear distinction between Comments, which can be transcribed in pretty much free form and utterances, which should be in regular CHAT.
4.  CHAT provides methods for inclusion of codes.  Codes can be tagged to particular utterances or to the GEM headers.

So, if people could just put their comments in CHAT GEM form, along with file headers, we could include them directly into the database.   One collection of this type that would be nice to enter, if I can find a student to do the reformatting, would be Liz Bates's diary notes from her daughter Julia.  Liz contributed these nearly 20 years ago, but I never included them in CHILDES because the format was not right.  I could try to restructure them into CHAT as an example.  Also, some of my earliest diary notes from Ross and Mark would also be best included in this format.  I am thinking that it might be good to organize these files in a separate folder on the web.  So, for the Ross and Mark commentary, the files would not be included in the core English-USA area, but in a separate GEM folder.  Of course, with
good XML tagging, it will be easy enough to locate material anywhere in the database.

Perhaps the biggest task here is coming up with a set of keywords for tagging the examples.  Roy Higginson had a set of identifiers that he used for constructing the CHILDES Bibliography and perhaps that could serve as a good first set for this purpose.  So, if Peter and a few others would like to pursue this, I would be willing to try to dig up that set of codes and organize it in a fashion appropriate for this purpose.

If you have a data set of this type you would like to share, please just drop me a note and we can go from there.

--Brian MacWhinney