July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 E-MELD “School” of Best Practice Helen Aristar-Dry & Gayathri Sriram The LINGUIST List Eastern Michigan University

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 The LINGUIST List Crew

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 Working late… Back

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 Using all available talent …. Back

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 Overview The E-MELD ‘School’ of Best Practice: latest version –Purpose What is ‘best practice’? Why ‘best practice’? –Organization Demo some of the facilities

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 A note about the name… Showroom of BP? …..Nope, it’s got rooms. House of BP? Funhouse? Playhouse? Outhouse? Bazaar? Palace? Chateau? Shed? School

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 What is Best Practice? Practices designed to insure that digital language resources : endure through time. can be reused by others, both now and in the future. are as independent as possible of computer environments, scholarly communities, and domains of application. -Bird & Simons 2003

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 Best Practice as we know it … Distinguish between the archival format and the presentation format(s). BP is concerned primarily with archival format. Archival formats should employ open file formats and open standards. Examples of archive formats: –Documents: plain text with XML markup. –Images: TIF 16 bit gray scale format –Audio files: pure (uncompressed) WAV files.... this afternoon

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 Best Practice Write metadata for the language resource in an approved format. Recommended: OLAC format A format mapped to OLAC, e.g., IMDI Make the metadata available to a general search engine. Recommended: An OLAC service provider, e.g. LINGUIST List

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 Best Practice For morphosyntactic markup: countenance different terminology sets but use an ontology of linguistic concepts (GOLD) as an interlanguage Relate the different morphological markup schemas to the ontology by means of a metaschema.

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 Why Best Practice? “Best practice is enduring practice” (Simons, bc) BP is important for all language documentation but especially for documentation of endangered languages

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 Why Best Practice? According to the Ethnologue, 52 languages have only 1 speaker left. Somewhere 52 field linguists are making audiotapes, videotapes, and transcripts….

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 What if... –Ten are transcribing in MS Word 6 (which probably won’t be readable in 15 years )

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 What if... –Ten more are using compressed audio formats? (and compressing away some of the data)

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 What if... –Two more forget to turn on the tape recorder?

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 A true story…. The BBC Doomsday Project…

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 So the School is designed to Help users preserve their valuable data for generations to come. –Data: Notes Images Audio & video –Users: linguists, programmers, archivists (digital) beginners or advanced users

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 Ob jectives: Teach Motivate Facilitate Invite (suggestions & participation)

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 What will the School offer? –Information about the preservation and digitization of data –Tutorials to provide hands-on training –Facilities for online operations on the linguist’s own data, i.e., creation of metadata –Tools (and links to tools) for client-side operations, i.e., text annotation –Reading material about various aspects of BP –showcase of data from 10 endangered languages digitized according to BP

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 How is the School organized? –Information –Tutorials –Online facilities –Client-sideTools –Reading material –Showcase of data from 10 endangered languages Classroom Workroom Tool Room Reading Room Exhibit Hall

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 The Exhibit Hall Purpose: to show what can be done within the BP framework Data (currently) from Biao Min and Mocovi Info on the language(s) Biao Min lexicon & metadata –Archive formats –Presentation formats (with some audio) Search: cross-language search at a fine- grained morphosyntactic level (thanks to the ontology) Comments facility for users What else?

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 Classroom Teach users how to: –choose equipment & software –create metadata and make it available for search –create an XML file, schema & metaschema –create and use stylesheets to transform XML files –annotate & transcribe audio & video files –acquire ethics –What else??

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 Workroom Where user gets to work on her own data, using BP tools for: metadata creation (ORE) terminology mapping annotation & transcription lexicon creation (FIELD) What else?

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 Reading Room –Reference materials –Manuals –Links to off-site tutorials –White papers –Glossary of terms (linked to other pages on the site) What else?

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 Toolroom Downloads of : FIELD (Laptop version) Standalone ORE Links to LDC, IMDI tools, etc. for –Conversion – Annotation What else?

July 11, 2003E-MELD 2003 The “School”