Working Group 5 Resource Transformation and Presentation Chairs

Working Group 5 Resource Transformation and Presentation Chairs: Members: Debbie Anderson, Laura Welcher 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 – Voice. Walker, Econv, Transana, Praat, Snack, Speech Tools 1. 5, Win. Cecil • Video Editing and Conversion – TMPGEnc, Video. Studio, Anvil, IBM MPEG-7 Annotation Tool, Media. Tagger • Video and Audio Alignment – TASX-environment, Win. Pitch. Pro, 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: – – – • Font. Lab: 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 s. IFR 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 lowbarrier 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 My. SQL 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 – S 5 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 Picture Easy 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´ !!