Working Group 5

Resource Transformation and Presentation

Chairs: Debbie Anderson, Laura Welcher

Members: Andrea Berez, Ed Garrett, Sadie Williams, Moses Ekpenyong, Ljuba Veselinova, Calvin Hendryx-Parker, Ulrike Kiefer

Embedded Correspondent:

Tanya Sydorenko

Our E-MELD Mission:

• To explore the School of Best Practice tool room

• To seek out new font and character converters, and tools for the transformation and presentation of audio and video

• To boldly define standards that linguists have not defined before…

Our Mission Plan

1. What do we have?

2. What do we want?

3. What’s the big picture?

Our Quadrant:• Audio Editing and Conversion

– VoiceWalker, Econv, Transana, Praat, Snack, Speech Tools 1.5, WinCecil

• Video Editing and Conversion– TMPGEnc, VideoStudio, Anvil, IBM MPEG-7

Annotation Tool, MediaTagger • Video and Audio Alignment

– TASX-environment, WinPitchPro, Audiamus, Transcriber 1.4.6,* Elan,* Transcriber 1.5.0,* Transana

* Tools with comments (note: restructure comments--wiki or BBS?)

What we have:Tools for Audio and Video

• The big ones (and only ones with comments)– ELAN (Custom tool, moderate barrier to use.)– Transcriber (Custom, but not specifically for

linguistic documentation. Low barrier to use.)

• Others we are using:– Audio “chopper” (Custom utility for ELAN.

Reads time stamps from ELAN and separates out sound clips for individual sentences)

– Sound Forge (Non-custom, but high utility, and frequently used)

What we want (add to SBP):Font and Character Converters

• What’s out there:– FontLab: converts to Unicode but the program is

expensive, and has a moderately high barrier to use.– Reprise: available from SIL, converts legacy-encoded

SIL Encore fonts to Unicode; moderately high barrier to use

– sIFR 2.0: converts short passages of plain HTML text to your choice of typeface, regardless of whether your user has that font (follow up--Calvin?)

• Our assessment: there is *lots* of room for inexpensive, easy-to-use font converters!

What we want (add to SBP):Presentation of Audio, Video

• Discussion of Content Management Systems for low-barrier presentation of resources.

• Discussion of CSS (Ed or Calvin?)– Useful if you are handing off your site to others to maintain

content, typically degrades gracefully

• Some others– Tool (?) create your own MySQL database using a webform.

You tell it what columns and tables to build and it generates the code needed to create the database and HTML interface

– S5 for creating online Powerpoint-like presentations using restructured text

Presentation Tool and BP Recommendation Note:

• Presentation tools should allow the display of related (bundled) resources in a similar context

– seems obvious, and we anticipate it in metadata, but in practice it is not always done

– certainly not a legacy practice (Survey and BLC)– Came up for video and transcriptions, but relates to

other kinds of resources as well (scanned images of manuscripts)

• BP recommendation: related resources should be available (or minimally discoverable) from the location of any of the component files

The Big PictureEasy to Use Tools

• There is a great need for tools with a low barrier to use…or enhanced training for field linguists with the more difficult technologies

– Note “difficulty” ranking is an important parameter for evaluations in SBP

• Desktop tools, browser plugins (Calvin)• There is also a need for tools to create resources

useful to speech communities– Significant user group– Goals and interests: interested more in good presentation,

easy access, less in analysis

The Big Picture:Who funds tools?

• Our consensus: it isn’t a good funding environment for tools right now.

• DEL, programs like HRELP support tools development wrapped in proposals about languages, not tool development per se.

• Federal funding for linguistics relatively small (for supporting tools development)

• Little business motivation

The Big Picture:Who makes tools?

• In house development is difficult (unless you can partner with a CS department)--but tight, long-term collaboration is important

• To boldly go… (a modest proposal)– Linguists shouldn’t have to be tool builders– Should a body exist that provides this service?

The Big Picture:Who Makes Tools?

• Contracting development is a possibility, but you still want that close, long-term collaboration

• Archives (or many of those involved with archives) are tool producers, and potentially significant producers in the future--needs broad support, encourage collaboration

The Big Picture:Who Coordinates Tool Building?• DELAMAN is likely an important

organization for the coordination of tool building by archives

• E-MELD could be the body that supports tool development (as a continuing grant)

• Could also be the body to which requests for tools could be made

tlho´ !!