ELAN
ELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator) is a professional tool for the creation of complex annotations on video and audio resources. It is a tool of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands (http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/).
SayMore uses ELAN's file format (.eaf) for its annotation files, so you can begin using SayMore for its simplicity and then use ELAN when your annotation needs become more sophisticated (more).
ELAN allows a richly nested and flexible set of tiers, which may be different for each media file. When SayMore uses an ELAN file as the basis for a creating media file's annotation file, it expects certain tiers to exist in that ELAN file. Others may be present, but they will be ignored by SayMore.
If you have an existing ELAN file and would like to associate it with a media file in SayMore, the following must be true:
There is a Transcription tier which has a type for which Time-alignable is selected (
).If you already have a tier for translation of those phrases, it must be:
a child of Transcription
named Phrase Free Translation
have a type for which the stereotype is Symbolic Association.
To use an existing ELAN file as the basis for a SayMore annotation file, select Copy an existing ELAN file on the Start Annotating tab. Then you can work with oral translation annotations and careful speech annotations, and transcription and free translation annotations.
If necessary, open the file in ELAN and work with transcription and free translations there. Be careful not to remove or rename the 'Transcription' and 'Free Translation' tiers, or add any additional tiers.
Note
You can drag an ELAN file into a session just like any file, and then add contributors and notes. However in this case, SayMore will not treat the file as an annotation file.
A Missing Media File tab appears in the
Sessions
tab if you click a <name>.eaf file but SayMore could not find
the media file. It shows the path to where SayMore expected to find
the media file. That path includes the expected file name.
In the top portion of the right pane, the Type column indicates that missing media, for example, AnnotationsWithMissingMedia.