ELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator) is an annotation tool that allows you to create, edit, visualize and search annotations for video and audio data. It was developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, with the aim to provide a sound technological basis for the annotation and exploitation of multi-media recordings. ELAN is specifically designed for the analysis of language, sign language, and gesture, but it can be used by everybody who works with media corpora, i.e., with video and/or audio data, for purposes of annotation, analysis and documentation.
ELAN supports:
display a speech and/or video signals, together with their annotations;
time linking of annotations to media streams;
linking of annotations to other annotations;
unlimited number of annotation tiers as defined by the users;
different character sets;
export as tab-delimited text files;
import and export between ELAN and Shoebox;
search options.
This manual helps you to understand and use the features of ELAN.
Part I explains the installation process.
Part II is the user's guide. It is organized around the following four topics:
ELAN documents
The screen display and the navigation through a document.
Annotations.
Search Options.
For each topic, basic information is given. Following that, the use of features is explained in a step by step way. It is recommended that you read the relevant chapter before starting to work with your own data.
Part III is the reference guide, i.e., it provides brief information on the following topics: mouse options, menu items, and shortcut keys. In addition, the key concepts of ELAN are defined.
An overview of the differences between the succeeding versions of ELAN can be found online via: http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/elan/release-notes.html.