We are excited to announce that CLIC will be offering a one-day workshop on the transcription program ELAN on Friday June 16, 2017. ELAN is a free professional tool developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics for the annotation of video and audio recordings by creating time-aligned transcription files. It is designed to allow for a great number of use cases, well-suited for efficient transcribing of monologic data as well as for complex annotations of recordings of multi-party interactions. In this workshop, we will learn and practice how to create transcription files, how to add basic glosses, translations, and codes, how to export and import these into/from a variety of other tools, how to export ELAN annotations into subtitles files for videos, and how to create templates and individual user/project-specific workflows. This session will be a general introduction to the program and it’s diverse functions and we have allocated practice time so that participants can begin developing their own templates and workflows.
The workshop will be lead by our very own Jan David Hauck. Jan received his M.A. in sociocultural anthropology from Free University, Berlin in 2008 and his Ph.D. in linguistic anthropology from UCLA in 2016. He has done extensive research on the socialization of children in an indigenous Aché community of Paraguay, analyzing the ideological and interactional constitution of linguistic difference and the development of metalinguistic awareness in a context of language shift and linguistic convergence. Between 2008 and 2013 he took part in a project for the documentation of Aché, part of the DOBES program for endangered languages.
Workshop Schedule
*Location Haines 279*
10 – 11am:
- Basic introduction to transcribing with ELAN
- Conceptual framework (Annotations, Tiers, Types, and Stereotypes)
11am – 12pm:
- Practice session
- Creating a transcription file
- Creating time-aligned annotations
12 – 1pm: Lunch, generously provided by CLIC
1 – 1:30pm:
- Advanced (but essential) topics
- Different work modes: Annotation mode, Transcription mode, Segmentation mode, Media synchronization mode and
the brand new, super exciting (but still beta) Interlinearization mode - Automation: Silence and speech recognizer, measuring pauses and overlaps, automatic segmentation [tokenizer], etc.
- Practice session
- Creating linguistic types
- Creating parent and child tiers for translations and coding
- Creating personalized templates and workflows
- Controlled vocabularies
- Import and export (Praat, Toolbox, Transcripts, Subtitles)
Preparation and what to bring
If you cannot bring your own computer, please send us an email, there will be computers available.
Please download ELAN for free at: https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/download/
(Mac users simply unzip the file and drag the entire folder into their applications folder. Windows and Linux users have to run the installer.)
Please also download the following 3 PDF documents from: https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/
- Full manual. The manual is good to have on your computer for doing text searches for specific functions, I wouldn’t recommend anyone reading or even printing the 300+ pages 🙂
- How-to Guide. Please print the How-to Guide and bring it to the workshop. It’s 15 pages of concise and precise step-by-step instructions, which we will practice. (I personally find it more useful and intuitive then the 25-page “User Guide” also available at the same website but if you want you can also read that one.)
- (For minimalists) the A4 Guide.
If you can, please bring a short ca. 30-40 seconds video or audio clip of your own data (please not longer than a minute!) in order to start setting up your own templates/workflows. I will have a sample clip in order to get started.
Additional software (all free to download) which you may find useful and we may cover on the day:
TextWrangler (to see/edit the XML structure of ELAN files): http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/download.html
Praat (for phonetic analysis): http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/
(on the Mac: 64-bit edition for anyone with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and higher)
VLC (cross-platform media player, the easiest way of adding subtitles): http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html
Mac only, for those who do not have Quick Time 7 Pro:
QT Amateur (free program that can export all the Quick Time 7 compatible formats, in case you need to extract the audio file from videos)