Accidentally working with different project versions in FLEx -- how to fix the problem

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.

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

results in a much simpler solution than cutting and pasting.

SayMore to FLEx

I've been experimenting today with SayMore, which is a way of organizing language documentation materials.

I think I'm probably typical of many people doing this work in that my materials are scattered across several locations -- on the hard drive at my office, on my laptop, in Dropbox -- and they are in several different formats (sound files, text files, some images, etc.)  One of the potential advantages of SayMore would be using it to organize links to all these things and keep the metadata about speakers, permissions, dates, formats, in a single place.  This screen, for example, has information about the various contributors and their roles.  There is a central repository for these, where you can keep background info (age, native language, contact information, permission form).  In these screen, Román Vidal López is the speaker in this audio clip.

I've also been interested in the new Annotation feature (present in the Alpha release), which provides a way to do first-pass transcription of audio and then export the annotations into a format that FLEx can read, for further analysis and correction.

To test this out today, I got an audio portion of the Address to the Triqui people and added it to SayMore.  (I did something wrong because the file comes out with the name NewEvent...)

When you have this in a format that you like, you can export it:

It ends up in a format called FLEx Interlinear XML.

You can now import this into a FLEx project.  Here is what the screen looks like after File | Import |FLExText Interlinear.

You browse to wherever the export file was located.  One little thing is that the default extension for an import file is .flextext, so at first you won't see your file.  You need to click on the FileType button and select .xml.

After you do that, (if everything is working right), you should see your transcription as an Interlinear Text in FLEx:

Overall, I was fairly pleased with the whole process.  There were one or two little glitches that may improve in the later releases:

a.) Before you do the annotation, you need to do a segmentation of the audio into little chunks.  You can then listen to these chunks at any speed you like, and they repeat until you've filled in the Transcription line to your satisfaction.   However -- if you start doing the transcription and discover you've accidentally put the segment boundary in a bad place (perhaps you cut off the last vowel), it does not seem like you can ever edit the segmentation.  At least, it wasn't obvious to me how to do this.

b.) To transcribe the Triqui properly, I needed to be able use the underscore diacritic (for low register tone).  I have a Keyman keyboard that allows me to do this properly in FLEx, but it did not seem that it would work in SayMore.  Possibly I missed some dialogue that would allow me to pick the font to a Unicode font that supports this diacritic?  Or something that allows me to pick my keyboard?

Still, these are fairly minor problems, and I think I could easily see using this for my next text transcription session.

Compared to ELAN, Praat, or Transcriber, the SayMore annotation tool is less elaborate.  (In my view ELAN is way too elaborate and unwieldy for my needs.  Praat is more a tool more suited to a phonetician's needs, and Transcriber works fine but its output does not import into FLEx in any straightforward way.)

Since my working style relies heavily on FLEx, anything that imports smoothly into that program has a huge advantage.  It is possible that if I were more focused on phonological, intonational, or gestural properties of the texts, it would be worth spending the time on something like Praat or Elan.  But since my interest is more keyed to morphosyntax and lexicon, I like a fairly light transcription tool that will help me do first-pass transcription, and SayMore looks promising for that.