Copying all annotations on one tier to a new file

ELAN
1

There are a couple of similar topics with answers, but none of them seem to capture my issue. My apologies if this is a repetitive topic.

I have 45 audio recordings of one-on-one interviews. I first went through and segmented all speech in two tiers, one for each participant, on every audio file. So, I now have 45 .eaf files with 2 tiers containing blank annotations.

I now need to populate these segments with text, but want to solidify my coding hierarchy first. I therefore populated one interview with text, and began working out my coding scheme and creating the relevant tier types, tiers, and controlled vocabularies.

I now want to use this tier template for the other files. However, it seems you can only effectively apply a template to a new file. I attempted the “merge transcriptions” option described in another post, but it didn’t work. I am also worried it would replace the existing segments.

Therefore, I am wondering if it is possible to create a new document using my template, and then copy all segments from the pre-segmented tiers in another .eaf file into the new .eaf file that uses the template. Does anyone know?

Edit: I have been troubleshooting, and so far the only solution I have come up with is to:

  1. Create a new .eaf file using my tier template
  2. Merge that .eaf with the one containing blank segments in the speech tier
  3. Link the relevant audio file
  4. Manually re-order the tiers, as the merge process reverts to default order

This is workable but somewhat tedious. Am I missing anything?

2

Hello,

What in principle (or in theory) could be used is the function
File->Multiple File Processing->Update Transcriptions with Template...
but it depends on how much consistency there is within those 45 files and what must be changed and what not.

This function has been developed for the situation where files started based on a template and where later changes to the template have to be applied to already existing files. This might work in your situation as well, but if e.g. all files have different names for their two tiers, it probably won’t. This function has a ‘dry-run’ option, so that you can try out first what would change, without actually changing anything.

-Han