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 languages, sign languages, and gestures, but it can also be used by anyone who works with media corpora, i.e., with video and/or audio data, for purposes of annotation, analysis and documentation.
ELAN supports:
the display of speech and/or video signals, together with their annotations;
the time linking of annotations to media streams;
the linking of annotations to other annotations;
an unlimited number of annotation tiers as defined by the users;
different character sets;
the export as tab-delimited text files;
the import and export between ELAN and Shoebox;
search options.
This manual helps you to understand and use the features of ELAN.
Part I is the user's guide. It is organized around the following five topics:
ELAN documents
the screen display and the navigation through a document
annotations
working Modes
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 relevant chapters before starting to work with your own data.
Part II is the reference guide, i.e., it provides brief information on the following topics:
mouse options
menu items
shortcut keys
key concepts of ELAN
An overview of the differences between the succeeding versions of ELAN can be found online via: https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan/release-notes.
![[Note]](images/note.png)