Hello,
I have a whole bunch of ELAN files that were originally transcribed with CHAT. I used CHAT2ELAN to get them into ELAN, linked them to their videos, then added my own tiers to code additional information. Now, I’m wondering if it’s possible to export the original CHAT metadata (e.g. child’s name, age, participants etc.) for these ELAN files along with my own new coding. I’ve tried everything (I think) but don’t see that this is possible, hence posting here. Note - I know the metadata is in there somewhere, since when I ELAN2CHAT a file back into CHAT, the metadata is there! This is good to know but I have so many files that I really need to use ELAN’s multiple export function and the spreadsheet it produces, rather than running ELAN2CHAT individually for each file. Thanks for any help!
-Emily
Hi, yes CHAT2ELAN stores metadata in PROPERTY elements in EAF. If you open one of your EAF files in a text editor you can see them, close to the top or beginning of the file.
I don’t think any of the export variants in ELAN exports these properties/metadata along with the annotations, so I can’t suggest a workaround or alternative export, I’m afraid.
Hi,
Ok, yes, I see it there. That’s unfortunate there’s no way to automate extracting the metadata, but it’s very helpful to know where to find it so I can do that part by hand. Thank you!
Emily
So, would you like those metadata to be exported into the same spreadsheet (or in other words, are you going to copy and paste those items into that spreadsheet)? Just for my understanding.
Hi,
Yes, the goal would be to have a column for each ELAN tier, and additional columns for child’s name and child’s age. (Then it can all go into R and I can ask questions about individual children and development over time.) So, yes, I plan to put that information into the spreadsheet by hand now.
Emily
Hi, thanks. I can understand that that kind of output is useful.
From an implementation point of view, I could imagine a generic option to also export “metadata” (i.e. PROPERTY elements in ELAN), but then these would become an additional number of rows, as a kind of headers before the annotation rows. The kind of output that you need (and that is useful) would require very (CHAT) specific treatment and parsing of the contents of PROPERTY elements.
Hi,
I think any way to export the data could/would be useful. But it sounds like implementation would be difficult. (For my particular purpose, I export one file per row, with tiers in columns (one annotation per tier). I imagined additional columns for each property element. Just in case that’s in any way helpful.)
-Emily