From ELAN to storybooks

Abstract: This presentation leads into the last tutorial of the session. Eric W. Campbell (UCSB), Guillem Belmar (UCSB), Jeremías Salazar (UCSB / MICOP), and Martín Gabriel Ruiz (UCSB / MICOP) will facilitate a 40-minute hands-on tutorial creating trilingual storybooks using ELAN. On the one hand, one of the many aspects of documentation that students get trained in during field methods classes involves the creation of a corpus of transcribed and annotated texts in the language of study. This often starts by recording some narratives, which are then properly transcribed and translated into the working language(s). There is software that can help make this process easy, such as ELAN. ELAN allows us to do time-aligned transcriptions, with associated translations, and it is a fairly user-friendly program.

On the other hand, there is often a need for storybooks for the community, and what better sources for those than the narratives community members share with us in their own language(s)? In this tutorial we are going to walk the participants through the steps of creating a storybook (monolingual or multilingual) from an ELAN file. This tutorial will include instruction in a) how to set up ELAN template with the goal of creating storybooks; b) exporting different tiers into word documents; c) recommendations of best practices to clean up the data; d) using open-source images available online to illustrate your storybooks; e) ways to proceed to create an audiobook online. Participants will be able to work with their own ELAN files or with a transcribed story we will provide. By the end of the tutorial, they will have created a printable illustrated storybook.