In PARADISEC we store media files with their transcriptions whenever possible, typically in .eaf format, created by the standard transcription tool Elan. Best practice in language documentation includes creating a corpus of media with transcripts so that others can access it in future and locate what is in the files. Untranscribed files remain largely inaccessible, relying on simple descriptive metadata. With the new catalog viewer (discussed earlier) we can search within files, not just in the descriptive metadata, and so we can find words inside Elan transcripts and instantly play the result.
PARADISEC has 16,339 Elan files in 9,979 items, and has previously had a player for these files, but it only presented the firdt tier of an Elan file, which may have been the transcript line, but also could have been a single chunk number or anything else the creator decided to include, because Elan files have as many tiers of annotation as the creator wants to add. An online player needs to take that into account, by presenting the user with a checklist of which tiers to display. John Ferlito has now written an Elan player that does this and is available for all items in our collection. For any media file in the PARADISEC catalog that has an .eaf file associated with it, displaying the media file will also show the Elan player, as can be seen in the video below. You can view the transcript either vertically or horizontally, and you can jump to anywhere in the file using the slider. The relationship between a media file and transcript is inferred from filenaming, with each sharing the same name but differing in their extension (.eaf vs .wav or .mp4). We will soon add a metadata entry to make the link explicit (‘isAnnotatonOf’, ‘hasAnnotation’) which will allow the creator to link different transcript or media files.
Example of audio playing with an Elan transcript. Matthew David telling a story about ten rats from Pangpang village, Efate, Vanuatu. https://catalog.paradisec.org.au/repository/NT16/2025072502/NT16-2025072502-01.mp3
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