Hello! I am teaching a module on ELAN this week. When my students tried to merge two .eaf files of which each of them had segmented and annotated a different part (but with the same tier type and tier structure), some of my participants had issues merging the .eaf files when the ‘append annotations’ option was selected. They had to deselect the ‘append annotations’ option and only then could they successfully merge the two .eaf files. Interestingly, the tier number of annotations would increase with the append annotations option, but the newly merged annotations were not visible. All the students were working with the 6.5 version of ELAN on Windows. We were wondering what could have created the issues with the append annotations option. This is to avoid problems merging files in the future.
Many regards
Aaricia Ponnet and the students of the ELAN module on MILS (Summer School Methods in Linguistics, Ghent University)
Hello Aaricia,
I understand the confusion. The ‘Append’ option has been introduced for a specific workflow, where a long video is first cut into shorter clips, which are then annotated separately. At the end these individual transcriptions are merged together where the annotations of e.g. clip 2 are placed after the annotations of clip 1 etc. In other words, the timeline of clip 2 is shifted roughly with the number of seconds of the duration of clip 1 (there are some options to specify how much the annotations of clip 2 should be shifted so that they will align correctly with the original recording).
As you discovered, when two annotators annotate different parts of the same video/audio file, the ‘Append’ option should not be used. If the option is used, the newly merged annotations will be located somewhere beyond the end of the media duration and not be visible in the timeline view (I guess you can see them in e.g the Grid viewer).
A relevant option in your situation would be in step two the “Allow existing annotation to be overwritten” option, in case e.g. the annotated parts of the two annotators would partially overlap.
Good luck with (the remainder) of the Summer School!
-Han
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