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 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´ !!