ELAN is computer

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

, a professional tool to manually and semi-automatically annotate and

transcribe Transcription refers to the process of converting sounds (voice, music etc.) into letters or musical notes, or producing a copy of something in another medium, including: Genetics * Transcription (biology), the copying of DNA into RNA, the fir ...

audio or video recordings. It has a tier-based data model that supports multi-level, multi-participant annotation of time-based media. It is applied in

humanities Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the t ...

and

social science Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of so ...

s research (

language documentation Language documentation (also: documentary linguistics) is a subfield of linguistics which aims to describe the grammar and use of human languages. It aims to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given spee ...

sign language Sign languages (also known as signed languages) are languages that use the visual-manual modality to convey meaning, instead of spoken words. Sign languages are expressed through manual articulation in combination with non-manual markers. Sign l ...

and gesture research) for the purpose of documentation and of qualitative and quantitative analysis. It is distributed as

free and open source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

under the GNU General Public License, version 3. ELAN is a well established professional-grade software and is widely used in academia. It has been well received in several

academic disciplines An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, f ...

, for example, in

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...

medicine Medicine is the science and practice of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, treatment, palliation of their injury or disease, and promoting their health. Medicine encompasses a variety of health care pr ...

psychiatry Psychiatry is the specialty (medicine), medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of mental disorders. These include various maladaptations related to mood, behaviour, cognition, and perceptions. See glossary of psych ...

education Education is a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims, such as transmitting knowledge or fostering skills and character traits. These aims may include the development of understanding, rationality, kindness, and honesty ...

, and behavioral studies, on topics such as

human computer interaction Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, ...

and

conversation analysis Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of social interaction, embracing both verbal and non-verbal conduct, in situations of everyday life. CA originated as a sociological method, but has since spread to other fields. CA began with ...

, group

interactions Interaction is action that occurs between two or more objects, with broad use in philosophy and the sciences. It may refer to: Science * Interaction hypothesis, a theory of second language acquisition * Interaction (statistics) * Interactions o ...

music therapy Music therapy, an allied health profession, "is the clinical and evidence-based use of music interventions to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship by a credentialed professional who has completed an approved music t ...

, bilingualism and child language acquisition, analysis of

non-verbal communication Nonverbal communication (NVC) is the transmission of messages or signals through a nonverbal platform such as eye contact, facial expressions, gestures, posture, and body language. It includes the use of social cues, kinesics, distance ( prox ...

and gesture analysis, and

animal behavior Ethology is the scientific study of animal behaviour, usually with a focus on behaviour under natural conditions, and viewing behaviour as an evolutionarily adaptive trait. Behaviourism as a term also describes the scientific and objectiv ...

. Several third-party tools have been developed to enrich and analyse ELAN data and corpora.Berez, A.; Cox, C. (2009): CuPED (Customizable Presentation of ELAN Documents). URL: http://sweet.artsrn.ualberta.ca/cdcox/cuped/ (accessed 2017/03/21)

Features

Its features include: * Manual and semi-automatic segmentation and annotation * Transcription and translation of speech * Tier hierarchies * Support for multiple media sources * Use of controlled vocabularies * Complex search *

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...

-based data format

History

ELAN is developed by the

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (German: ''Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik''; Dutch: ''Max Planck Instituut voor Psycholinguïstiek'') is a research institute situated on the campus of Radboud University Nijmegen located ...

in Nijmegen. The first version was released around the year 2000 under the name EAT, Eudico Annotation Tool. It was renamed to ELAN in 2002. Since then, two to three new versions are released each year. It is developed in the programming language

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

with interfaces to platform native media frameworks developed in C,

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

, and

Objective-C Objective-C is a general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was selected by NeXT for its NeXT ...

References

Notes

* Crasborn, O., Sloetjes, H. (2008). Enhanced ELAN functionality for sign language corpora. In: Proceedings of LREC 2008, Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. *

External links

*
ELAN third party resources (Templates, Scripts, Tools, Workflow descriptions, HowTos)
* Manuals: *
Hellwig, B. (2017): ELAN – Linguistic Annotator (Manual)
*
RedHenLab (2016). How to annotate with ELAN (Tutorial)
*
Rosenfelder, I. (2011): A Short Introduction to Transcribing with ELAN
*
Colletta J.M. (2009): Coding manual – Multimodal Data Transcription and Annotation with ELAN
{{DEFAULTSORT:ELAN software Transcription (linguistics) Linguistic research software Free QDA software Cross-platform free software Science software for macOS Science software for Linux

Features

History

See also

References

Notes

External links