Editing multiple files

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 two options to do just this: Edit Multiple Files... and Scrub Transcriptions.... 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.

When you choose Scrub Transcriptions..., you first need to specify a new domain or select an existing domain. Do one of the following:

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.

Figure 5.77. Transcription Scrubber

Transcription Scrubber


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. 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 the 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.

Note

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.

Figure 5.78. Multiple File Editor

Multiple File Editor


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.