the benefits of ELAN

[Lou de B]

Sign writing, as Sonja has said, is a transcription system or orthography,
as is HamNoSys etc. I don¹t know anything about ANVIL, but have been using
ELAN daily for close to 2 years and it is a fantastic program that allows
you an infinite number of tiers to annotate what you want (such as
individual signs, or whole clauses) however you want (eg English glosses, or
some sort of more phonetic transcription). Unless you are looking at the
phonology, generally an indepth phonetic transcription is not needed as the
annotations are time aligned with the video. That means you always have
access to the raw data in front of you. The great thing about using a
program like ELAN is that you are then able to search your data for (just a
couple of egs, the uses are multiple) frequency of something, length of time
of something in a text (eg overlaps), or co-occurrence of one thing with
another. This means instead of having an archive of data, you have a
machine-readable corpus. Absolutely invaluable for going back to the data
again and again.

ELAN is free, constantly updated, help is available by email or to the ELAN
list. Additionally, you can give feedback to the guys working on it so it
evolves to meet your needs. Basically, I have found very little that ELAN is
unable to do in our use of it in Australia (with Trevor Johnston and Adam
Schembri in London). That¹s my rant and rave for it. I¹m a serious convert.

Louise de Beuzeville


On 2/5/08 8:06 PM, "Sonja Erlenkamp" <sonja.erlenkamp at hist.no> wrote:

> I wouldn't compare a writing- (or transcription)system with a dataprogramm (as
> Elan is), which is used to link annotations to a videofile. They have
> different functions in the analysis of the data. I'd rather combine them. :)
>  
>  
> Best regards
>  
> Sonja Erlenkamp
> 
> 
> Fra: slling-l-bounces at majordomo.valenciacc.edu på vegne av Ingvild Roald
> Sendt: fr 02.05.2008 11:16
> Til: A list for linguists interested in signed languages
> Kopi: A list for linguists interested in signed languages
> Emne: Re: [SLLING-L] ANVIL versus ELAN
> 
> For transcription and analysis of dialogues, I don't know about ANVIL or ELAN,
> but it could be done in SignWriting (hhtp://www.signwriting.org). Examples of
> communications between two and three persons have recently been published on
> the sw-list. SignWriting can be exported as XML
> 
> Ingvild Roald, Norway (not a linguist)
> 
> 
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