In joint work with Sunny Ananthanarayan (U Washington), Sophie Pierson (UT Austin), and Claire Bowern (Yale), we’ve released Flibl, a new software tool that improves import/export of texts between ELAN and the database software FieldWorks Language Explorer, or FLEx.

Our paper describing the tool has now been published in Language Documentation & Conservation.

It’s titled “Flibl: A Tool to Ease Text Transfer Between ELAN and FLEx” and the abstract reads

Two of the most common software tools in language documentation are ELAN, for transcription, and FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx), for interlinearization. Many language documentarians use these tools together, and the transcribed output of ELAN is natural input to FLEx. Despite this, out of the box the two programs are not effectively interoperable. FLEx also does not allow users to display many data structures that are visible in ELAN and necessary for research purposes, such as speaker attributions. Therefore, we created Flibl [flɪbɫ]̩ , a software tool that automatically converts between the data formats used by ELAN and FLEx while keeping all ELAN information visible. This article offers a description and tutorial on the software. We describe our research motivations for creating Flibl, how researchers can use it and for what topics, and how the software works on the backend.

Read the LD&C paper open access here.

Download the tool at https://github.com/amaliaskilton/flibl.