I was away for a couple of weeks and my graduate student was working with our Triqui FLEx database. She and our native speaker colleague were looking for entries where there was no example sentence and he was creating examples for these entries.
Unfortunately, when I got back and we looked at the project together, we saw that she had accidentally opened and modified an old version of the project.
At first, I thought we would just have to look for the entries modified in the old project and cut and paste them to the new, but after a bit of thought, I found a much easier way. Since this problem is likely to arise in any collaborative FLEx project, it's possibly useful to others as well.
Since I knew the dates that she had worked with our speaker while I was away, the first step was to go to Bulk Edit and add the Date Modified field to the Column Choices. The Restrict choice lets you select the dates that you want to look at.
This resulted in a little bit of duplication. Luckily the import log that is produced showed me all the entries where this was an issue:
What I needed to then was to look at the entries for the listed conflicts. The first one involved duplicated entries, so I used the Merge Entry feature to combine the two forms of ananj chij. The other three conflicts involved duplicated senses, so I went to each entry and merged the senses. (Pull-down menu to the left of the Sense label.)
It's still best to try to avoid working on different version of a project, and I don't know what the solution would be if the interlinear texts had been modified. But if the accidental use of different versions only affects lexical entries, then
Unfortunately, when I got back and we looked at the project together, we saw that she had accidentally opened and modified an old version of the project.
At first, I thought we would just have to look for the entries modified in the old project and cut and paste them to the new, but after a bit of thought, I found a much easier way. Since this problem is likely to arise in any collaborative FLEx project, it's possibly useful to others as well.
Since I knew the dates that she had worked with our speaker while I was away, the first step was to go to Bulk Edit and add the Date Modified field to the Column Choices. The Restrict choice lets you select the dates that you want to look at.
Once I had done this, I could see that there were 14 entries modified during this time.
So I exported these entries from the older version of the project via LIFT. Then I imported the same entries into the current project version.
This resulted in a little bit of duplication. Luckily the import log that is produced showed me all the entries where this was an issue:
What I needed to then was to look at the entries for the listed conflicts. The first one involved duplicated entries, so I used the Merge Entry feature to combine the two forms of ananj chij. The other three conflicts involved duplicated senses, so I went to each entry and merged the senses. (Pull-down menu to the left of the Sense label.)
It's still best to try to avoid working on different version of a project, and I don't know what the solution would be if the interlinear texts had been modified. But if the accidental use of different versions only affects lexical entries, then
- filtering by Date Modified,
- exporting entries from Project A,
- importing entries to Project B, and
- checking the Import Log for conflicts
2 comments:
I've actually been recommending Dropbox or Sugarsync to people for shared lexical databases lately. It automatically updates the database file across computers, so you don't have to worry about versioning.
http://danielhieber.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/hieber-digital-collaboration-21st-century-tools-for-revitalization.pdf
Hi Danny
We do use Dropbox for the backups -- but there is still some potential for error this way, since everyone has to remember to check for more recent versions and use the restore function. But do you mean that your actual working files (and not the backups) are on Dropbox?
Post a Comment