In the dialog window below (which pops up as the first dialog for most of the multiple file operation) do one of the following:
*.eaf
) to select
it. It now appears in the rightmost box. Alternatively, you can click on the
annotation file name and click the >>
button.
Repeat this for every annotation file you want to include.
It is also possible to select a complete directory. All
.eaf
files in a selected directory will be
included.
Elan offers the possibility to import multiple files at once and save them as *.eaf files. To do so click on File > Import Multiple Files As... and one of the options.
To import multiple toolbox files for conversion to *.eaf, click File > Import Multiple Files As... > Toolbox file(UTF-8).... This operation consists of 3 steps.
When the operation has completed, you will be presented with a process report. The multiple *.eaf files are now ready to be used in ELAN.
Multiple TextGrid files created in Praat can be imported and converted to *.eaf files. This process involves 3 steps.
In this dialog, you can choose to include Praat PointTiers and if empty annotations or intervals should be skipped or not.
When the operation has completed, you will be presented with a process report. The multiple *.eaf files are now ready to be used in ELAN.
To import multiple FLExtext files for conversion to *.eaf, click File > Import Multiple Files As... > FLEx file.... This operation consists of 3 steps.
You can select wether to use the 'interlinear-text and 'paragraph' element in FLEx, import the participant infromation and what the smallest time-alignable element should be: 'phrase' or 'word'. Choose on what level you want to create linguistic types and set a duration per phrase element (required).
Finally, configure how and where to save your files. You can choose to save with an .XML or .flextext extension, and you can skip files that would result in having no tiers.
ELAN offers the possibility to export multiple annotation files as one file. To do so click on File > Export Multiple Files As... and one of the options.
To export multiple files as toolbox files, click on File > Export Multiple Files As... > Toolbox file(UTF-8).... This process involves 3 steps.
From the drop down list select the tiers to use in the overlaps computation. You can select all the tiers displayed in the list if you click on Select All, or deselect them if you click on Select None. Once you have made your choice for the tiers for which the overlaps should be found, you can select next, this will bring you to the next step.
In this step you can define output settings and the Toolbox options. The option are more clearly defined in Toolbox file(UTF-8)
To export multiple files as FLEx files, click on File > Export Multiple Files As... > FLEx File.... This process involves 4 steps.
In this step you can select a linguistic type to use for the 'morph-type' tiers. It's also possible to uncheck this, if not needed. From the dialog, you can also map the linguistic types to the different items, which are listed on top.
In the next dialog, you can specify the element-item linguistic type and set a language for it. ELAN can try to extract that from a tier name, (if the box is checked) but it is also possible to add (or remove) a value for a language or type. To do so, enter a value ('en' in this example) and click Add. Then, you can select the added value from the drop-down menu under 'language'. You need to set a type and language for every Linguistic Type Name in order to be able to go to the final step. For more information on the structure of FLEx, see Figure 4.27, “FLEx to ELAN structure”.
To export multiple files as praat textgrid, click on File > Export Multiple Files As... > Praat TextGrid .... This process involves 2 steps. See Praat TextGrid file for more details.
To export multiple files as Tab-delimited Text, click File > Export Multiple Files As... > Tab-delimited Text....
The following options cannot be checked:
To export multiple files as List of annotations, click File > Export Multiple Files As... > List of annotations....
To export multiple files as Tab-delimited Text, click File > Export Multiple Files As... > List of Words....
There could be situations in which you want to discard or select tiers from
multiple .eaf
files, for instance if you want to present a third
party with a limited number of tiers. To do so, select File > Export
Multiple Files As...
>Selected Tiers as EAF.... In
the first dialog(see How to select multiple files) you can select
the files from which you want to export a selection of tiers.
Once you have selected your files, Export Tiers from Multiple Files dialog appears.
To export, do the following:
Export parent tiers of the selected dependent tiers
automatically
or to Only export dependent tiers if
their parent tiers are selected
.
Save files with original names
of to
Make use of suffixes
. In case of the latter, you can
specify whether to save the files with their original name followed by a
suffix or to save the files with a new base name and followed by a suffix
number.
This function is available via menu File->Export Multiple Files As-> Annotation Overlaps Information....
This function allows the user to select one “reference” tier and multiple other tiers that will be compared (sequentially) with the reference tier. The comparison is done on the level of the annotations.
The following information will be present in the resulting tab-delimited text file:
Column 1- 4:
Begin time | End time | Duration | Reference Tier Name |
These columns will contain information for all annotations of the reference tier. The annotation values are in the column with the tier name as the header, the time info in the first 3 columns.
Next for each “comparing” tier there will be 11 columns, the header of which consists of the tier name and a suffix and the column contains the following information:
1 | Name-ov | 0 or 1, whether there is an overlapping annotation or not (0=no, 1=yes) |
2 | Name-same | 0 or 1, whether the overlapping annotation has the same value. If there are more than one overlapping annotations the value is 0 (0=no, 1=yes) |
3 | Name-ov-dur | The duration of the overlap, the total overlap duration in case of more than one overlapping annotation |
4 | Name-no-ann | The number of overlapping annotations |
5 | Name-value | The value of the overlapping annotation, concatenated, comma separated, in case of multiple overlaps |
6 | Name-bt-to-bt-After | The amount of time from the beginning of the reference annotation to the beginning of the first non |
7 | Name-et-to-bt-After | The amount of time from the end of the reference annotation to the beginning of the first non overlapping annotation |
8 | Name-et-to-et-After | The amount of time from the end of the reference annotation to the end of the first non overlapping annotation |
9 | Name-bt-After | The begin time of the annotation on the comparing tier after the reference annotation |
10 | Name-et-After | The end time of the annotation on the comparing tier after the reference annotation |
11 | Name-value-After | The value of the first annotation on the comparing tier after the reference annotation |
After the header, for each file there will be the following information/data:
All time values are in milliseconds.
Normally ELAN allows to edit only a single file at a time. There are situations in which it is convenient to edit multiple files at once. The menu item File > Multiple File Processing gives a number of options to do just this. When selecting either of them, you are warned that you should have copies of the files you are going to work on in case you want to restore the files (there is no Undo for multiple file edits).
When you choose this option Create Transcription Files for Multiple Media Files..., you see the following dialog.
Options :
To specify a separator in the filename to identify the suffix or preffix, check this option Specify custom affix separator character ('-' and '_' are built in).
Click on Start to create the transcriptions based on the options set.
The option Edit Multiple Files... shows, after clicking Yes in the warning dialog mentioned above, the Multi File Editor. The first thing to do here is to load a domain by clicking Load domain. Loading a domain is the same as for the Scrub Transcriptions... option. To be able to load a domain you must of course have created one beforehand(see How to select multiple files). After loading a domain, the data is shown in the table. In this table you can edit tiers on the Tiers tab and linguistic types on the Linguistic Types tab.
To edit a name, annotator or participant of a tier, double click the corresponding table cell or select it and start typing. To change the linguistic type of a tier, select one from the drop down menu. You can add a tier by clicking Add tier and remove one by clicking Remove tier.
If there are hierarchy inconsistencies (e.g. if a tier in one file does have a parent while a tier with the same name in another file does not) removing tiers is not possible. The button Remove tier is therefore greyed out.
On the Linguistic Types tab, the name of a linguistic type can be changed by
double clicking the corresponding table cell in the Type Name
column.
Changes made in the Tiers and Types tabs are applied to all the files in the domain after clicking the Save changes to domain files button.
When you choose Scrub Transcriptions..., you first need to specify a new domain or select an existing domain. This option helps you to "clean" the annotation files (*.eaf) of possible tabs or whitespace characters which are often overlooked by the user but are still saved in the file. To select, create or delete a domain see How to select multiple files.
In the next dialog, you can specify what characters to delete, new line characters, tab characters and/or whitespace characters, and in what position these characters have to be. Click Start to start the scrubbing process. The progress of the scrubbing is shown in the progress bar.
The option Annotations From Overlaps... for multiple files is the same function as annotations from overlaps in the current open file (see Creating annotations from overlaps ), but applied to a selection of files. The first step allows to select a custom set of files in a file browser or to load a set of files that have been stored as a domain. For loading or creating new domain see How to select multiple files The list of tiers is the sum of all tier names encountered in the selected files. The options in the next steps are the same, clicking the Finish button in the last step the new tier is created and populated with annotations in all files of the domain.
The option Annotations From Subtraction... for multiple files is the same function as annotations from subtraction in the current open file (see Create Annotation By subtraction ), but applied to a selection of files. The first step allows to select a custom set of files in a file browser or to load a set of files that have been stored as a domain. For loading or creating new domain see How to select multiple files The list of tiers is the sum of all tier names encountered in the selected files. The options in the next steps are the same, clicking the Finish button in the last step the new tier is created and populated with annotations in all files of the domain.
This function Statistics for Multiple Files is similar to annotation statistics for the current file (see Annotations Statistics). The main difference after selecting the files in the domain is that it is possible to select which tiers to include in the calculations. The tables in the tabs do not have the column showing the total annotation duration as a percentage of the media duration but most do have a column for the number of files a certain value (tier or type name etc.) has been encountered in. After changes in the selection of files or in the selection of tiers the Update Statistics button needs to be clicked before the new calculations are started.