1.3. Workflow

When working with Arbil, you have to decide whether you are going to work on an existing corpus from the Remote Corpus or create a new corpus. Assuming that you intend to edit metadata in the archive and add additional media files, you will have to follow the steps 1-6 below.

The Arbil workflow for editing a corpus is as follows:

1) Browse the Remote Corpus and select the corpus which you intend to edit; drag it from the Remote Corpus panel into the Local Corpus panel so as to import it.

2) Now that the corpus is located in the Local Corpus, you may edit it freely. To edit the metadata, drag the node into the Table Area (marked with number 6 in figure 1.1 ) and edit the fields accordingly (editing can also be done in an external editor). This can be done with several corpora/sessions at once.

3) In order to add resources to sessions (e.g. media files and annotations), you must set up a working directory which links a folder on your computer to Arbil. This means that any media files in this folder will appear in the Working directory area so that resource files can be added to the sessions of a corpus in your Local Corpus. To add files to your new corpus, drag and drop them from the tab Files to the Local Corpus. Now you can edit the metadata following step 2 above.

4) Stored session elements, such as common actors, can be added to the local corpus via the right click optionAdd from favorites.

5) Once your metadata have been edited correctly and your desired media files have been added to your sessions, you can export the metadata files to a directory (folder) on your computer.

In order to create a new node, add a node in the Local Corpus and follow the same steps.

Note: This is as far as you can get using Arbil.

6) Once the work is finished, Open Lamus and import the directory (folder) which contains the corpora. It is crucial to note that instead of uploading single files you can make use of the potential of Arbil and upload entire directories including all linkages among the individual files contained. Via Lamus, your work can then be uploaded to the archive.

Corpus and session nodes are easily edited directly in Arbil (see chapter 4 and chapter 5) but they can also be worked on in an external editor, such as Microsoft Excel or another spreadsheet program (see 7.3).

Arbil Work flow

Figure 1.2. Arbil Work flow


In Arbil all work on corpora and sessions takes place in the Local Corpus tree. The various import, export, and edit operations, displayed in the figure above, can usually be triggered by right-clicking on elements in the Local Corpus, or via "drag and drop" (e.g.. clicking on an element in the Remote Corpus, holding the mouse key and dragging the element to the Local Corpus, or to a corpus node within the Local Corpus). Media files (i. e. audio and video recordings) and written resources can also be added to sessions via "drag and drop" from the Working Directories tree in the Files tab. Only for importing previously exported sessions to the local corpus root one has to access the File menu in Arbil's menu bar.