[RNLD] Links between publication and sound corpus

[Mark W. Post]

I think that what Steffen's asking for is something a little more basic, 
and (I think) from the perspective of someone (like myself) who doesn't 
know what shell scripts or cgi scripts are, much less how to write them. 
So, if we take Stephen Morey's Tai grammar as an example, he had 
hyperlinks in a .doc file link to individual .wav files, which were 
obtained by manually copying out of a longer .wav file. An alternative 
to this might be to keep the longer .wav intact and have the hyperlinks 
instead reference durations using time code. So, yes, ultimately it 
might be nice if the longer .wav in question were stably housed in an 
archive somewhere and the hyperlinks linked to it (although this 
wouldn't help people with slow internet connections very much, which, 
believe it or not, is still the case for very many if not most internet 
users, and many potential users of descriptive grammars of minority 
languages!), but in the medium-term it would be useful to know how to 
hyperlink to durations within, say, a single directory (again, as in 
Stephen's grammar, but with time code rather than individual files).

Cheers
Mark

On 07/03/2013 15:12, Doug Cooper wrote:
> My experience is that if you know the sound intervals in advance, it's
> easiest in the long run to use sox or mp3splt [sic] to chop up the files
> from the get-go.  You can:
>
>  - create them all at once from a shell script (batch file),
>  - use the start-finish (or start-duration) details as file names,
>  - serve them from anywhere on the Web as standalone audio files,
>  - link to them (as audio files) from anywhere (e.g. PDFs or Web pages).
>
>   As far as I know the alternative is to write a cgi script that does the
> exact same thing, but is more painful in regard to linking and serving.
> It also creates a long-term dependency issue for secondary applications
> like dictionaries, which would have to rely on your server forever, 
> rather
> than copying the snippets they need.  (I'm not aware of any archives that
> provide an API for random access to archived audio.)
>
>   None of this prevents you from metatagging the original, complete file
> with all the gory time interval details, of course.
>
>   Good luck,
>   Doug
>
>
> On 3/7/2013 7:52 PM, Steffen Haurholm-Larsen wrote:
>> I am a Danish PhD student writing my dissertation at the University 
>> of Bern,
>> Switzerland, in the form of a grammar of Garifuna, an Arawakan 
>> language spoken
>> in most Central American countries. I am posting here because I have 
>> so far
>> been unable to accomplish the linkage of specific parts of recordings 
>> to texts
>> of language description such as a dissertation. I am thinking that 
>> someone in
>> the linguistic community might have done this or have some suggestions.
>>
>> I intend to follow the best practices in language documentation with 
>> all that
>> this entails in terms of data portability, metadata, archiving etc. 
>> and I
>> would also like to incorporate the underlying data in the writing of my
>> dissertation, and I figure it will much easier to start linking 
>> examples to
>> media files from the beginning rather than having to go through the 
>> whole
>> dissertation at the end and put those links in.
>>
>> However, to date I know of no program or tool that will allow me to link
>> directly between a document such as a dissertation, and directly play a
>> specific time interval in a media file, that is, I would like to 
>> avoid cutting
>> my audio files up into little pieces but rather just link to the 
>> specific time
>> code where the relevant example is located. I am transcribing in ELAN 
>> which
>> does allow the user to search and go directly to a specific 
>> annotation and it
>> is possible to do quite specific searches, but I have yet to figure 
>> out how
>> one might access a specific annotation / sound interval directly by a 
>> link
>> inside the dissertation text itself.
>>
>> Does anybody know of such a program or perhaps who might have done 
>> something
>> similar?
>>
>> The reason I would like to do this is the accessibility that this 
>> would add to
>> the data - ultimately it should be possible to link both ways, from the
>> descriptive work to the corpus and back, and preferably also with a 
>> link to a
>> dictionary.
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>> Steffen Haurholm-Larsen
>> Universit�t Bern

-- 
Mit freundlichen Grüssen

Dr. Mark W. Post
Universität Bern
Institut für Sprachwissenschaft
Länggassstrasse 49
3000 Bern 9
Switzerland

Tel +41 31 631 37 07
Eml markwpost at gmail.com
Web unibe-ch.academia.edu/MarkWPost