Software demonstration: CuPED (Customizable Presentation of ELAN Documents)
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2009-03-14
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A common outcome of language documentation projects is the annotated corpus, a collection typically consisting of both an archival component intended for posterity, as well as a presentational component in which archival resources are repackaged in an interpretive manner, so as to be of more immediate use to a speaker community. While the development of software facilitating the production of archival materials has received considerable attention in recent years, less attention appears to have been paid to the development of comparable software serving to transform such archival materials easily into attractive and accessible presentation formats. A case in point is ELAN (MPI Nijmegen), an increasingly popular piece of software that creates XML-based, time-aligned transcripts of audio and video data. Many ELAN users are documentary linguists who need to produce web-ready versions of their archival-quality transcripts – a need which is addressed only in part by current versions of this software. Here we demonstrate CuPED, a tool that transforms ELAN files into customizable web- or CD-based presentations easily and without extensive computer training. The display consists of a media player for the audio or video, plus corresponding transcription tiers. Annotations can be played individually, or the entire media file can be viewed from start to finish with highlighted scrolling text. CuPED’s simple interface allows users to customize fonts and their respective display options (color, size, etc.) on a by-tier basis. Likewise, the position of the media player can be configured, allowing space for user-added images or photographs. CuPED is written in Python, and relies upon several portable, open-source components to produce standards-compliant XHTML/CSS and to convert archival media transparently into appropriate web presentation formats. The tool provides full support for Unicode in ELAN documents, with both command-line and graphical user interfaces for easier integration into the specific archive-to-web workflows of both individual users and of larger, collaborative projects. CuPED has been designed as a cross-platform tool, capable of running under a wide range of operating systems and processors, with precompiled versions offered at present for Windows and Mac OS X. As free software released under the GNU General Public License, the full source code of CuPED is available to all interested parties for extension, elaboration, and improvement.
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
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