School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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Building an interactive corpus of field recordings

Thieberger, N (Paris: ELRA, 2004)

There is a growing need for linguists working with small and endangered languages to be able to provide documentation of those languages that will serve two functions, not only the analysis and presentation of examples and texts, but also the means for others to access the material in the future. In this presentation I describe the workflow developed in the course of writing a description of South Efate, an Oceanic language of Vanuatu for a PhD dissertation. This workflow steps through (i) field recording; (ii) digitising or capturing media data as citable objects for archival purposes; (iii) transcribing those objects with time-alignment; (iv) establishing a media corpus indexed by the transcript; (v) instantiating links between text and media using a purpose-built tool (Audiamus); (vi) exporting from Audiamus to interlinearise while maintaining timecodes; (vii) extracting citable example sentences for use in a grammatical description; (viii) exporting from Audiamus in XML, Quicktime or other formats.