ELAN is computer
software, a professional tool to manually and semi-automatically annotate and
transcribe 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 and
social sciences research (
language documentation,
sign language and
gesture research) for the purpose of documentation and of qualitative and quantitative analysis. It is distributed as
free and open source software 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, for example, in
psychology,
medicine,
psychiatry,
education, and
behavioral studies, on topics such as
human computer interaction,
sign language and
conversation analysis, group
interactions,
music therapy,
bilingualism
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all E ...
and child
language acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to ...
, analysis of
non-verbal communication and
gesture
A gesture is a form of non-verbal communication or non-vocal communication in which visible bodily actions communicate particular messages, either in place of, or in conjunction with, speech. Gestures include movement of the hands, face, or ot ...
analysis, and
animal behavior.
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-based data format
History
ELAN is developed by the
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in
Nijmegen
Nijmegen (;; Spanish and it, Nimega. Nijmeegs: ''Nimwèège'' ) is the largest city in the Dutch province of Gelderland and tenth largest of the Netherlands as a whole, located on the Waal river close to the German border. It is about 6 ...
. 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 with interfaces to platform native media frameworks developed in
C,
C++, and
Objective-C.
See also
*
Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software
Computer-assisted (or aided) qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) offers tools that assist with qualitative research such as transcription analysis, coding and text interpretation, recursive abstraction, content analysis, discourse analysis, ...
*
Language documentation
*
Language documentation tools and methods The field of language documentation in the modern context involves a complex and ever-evolving set of tools and methods, and the study and development of their use - and, especially, identification and promotion of best practices - can be considered ...
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)
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Free QDA software
Cross-platform free software
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