A single piece of software for documentation?

Technology
2

Hi @tihomir, you’re in the right place :laughing: Welcome!

This is a topic that is near and dear to the hearts of, I would say, most of the people here! The ELAN/Flex tango is problematic indeed, and it breaks up the way we work in counter-intuitive ways — after all, analysis at all linguistic levels takes place throughout the documentation (and description!) process, so having to completely switch software contexts to annotate at one level or another is pretty bonkers.

My personal opinion is that we need to take it from the top: we need to have answers to all these questions:

  • What do we mean by documentary data?
  • What are the workflows that documentary linguists and friends use throughout the documentary process?
  • What kinds of user interfaces do we need to help linguists carry out those workflows?

These are very broad questions, and designing solutions is a very big project. There are a lot of ongoing efforts in that direction, see:

So people are thinking about this stuff, and your thoughts are welcome.

I think the specific issue you raise about an interface for informed consent is a very good one. What kind of consent materials are you dealing with? Can you share how you visualize such an interface? One thing I try to do around here is to really encourage people to articulate the user interfaces they need as in as specific a way as possible. We have an ongoing discussion about the design of an interface for collecting botanical terminology (for instance) that you might find interesting here.

Personally, I thinking working up to a single piece of software that does “everything” is quite a long-term prospect. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t start thinking about designing new interfaces that handle some of the functionalities that we need.

Thanks for your thoughts! :pray:

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