Accessing, managing, and mobilizing an ELAN-based language documentation corpus: the Kwaras and Namuti tools

Lucien Carroll, Gabriela Caballero-Hernandez, Kevin Mach

Abstract:

This paper introduces Kwaras and Namuti, two new tools for building, man-
aging, accessing, and mobilizing ELAN-based language documentation corpora.
Kwaras integrates WAV files, ELAN annotations, and document metadata into
a web-based corpus, allowing immediate access to annotations and recordings.
Namuti builds from Kwaras and enables different uses of language documenta-
tion products for different audiences and provides links from linguistic analyses
to language documentation corpora. The main goal of these new tools is three-
fold: (i) to facilitate the use of language documentation in linguistic analysis; (ii)
to increase transparency of documentation-based analyses, providing interested
users full access to the data on which generalizations are based and contextual-
ization of the projects that generated the data; and (iii) to enable uses of language
corpora that may serve the interests of multiple stakeholders,including academic
researchers and community members interested in language maintenance and re-
vitalization. We provide a basic overview of how Kwaras and Namuti work, lay
out instructions on how to download and use Kwaras, and discuss what uses it
currently supports. This article also issues a call for increased collaboration be-
tween linguists,community members,language activists,and software developers
to further develop these and other similar resources.