Timedur, %tim, and getting elapsed time output

[Brian Verdine]

Hi everyone,

I'm a new user and I have been doing some work to convert a homegrown transcription system to CHAT files.  The transcriptions I converted all had a start time that was the timestamp from the videos and every X utterances, transcribers were asked to write another timestamp, including specifically stamping the last utterance.  I did not want to lose this information, so when I created the CHAT files I used a VB script to put the start time in with an "@Time Start:  mm:ss" header and then placed all of the following timestamps into the transcriptions with %tim tiers, resulting in a file that looks like the attached.  Because these transcriptions are converted from another format, they are not linked in any way to the video using bullets.

I'm having a hard time finding a lot of information about getting commands to read time information written into the transcriptions or if there is a simple way to just output the total elapsed time for a transcription from the start time and  %tim tiers.  From what I gather timedur does not look at %tim tiers and I can verify that when I run it on these files it outputs a blank excel sheet with timedur column headers.  

I am not necessarily looking to do anything fancy. I want to be able to auto-calculate the total time for identifying possible reliability concerns, report average transcribed times in a methods section, and maybe be able to do some basic rate calculations in CLAN based on total time.  

Is there a command I'm missing?  Is there a different format, headers, or tiers I would need to use?  Or is there a way I can simply get the program to output the start time and the last %tim tier for a group of files to an excel sheet so that I can calculate the elapsed times quickly as a batch?  I could have people go through them individually and make changes or just calculate the times, but it is about 120 transcriptions.  I figured some time investigating ways to automate this might be worth it.

Thanks for any help!

Brian

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Brian,

    Unfortunately, none of the CLAN programs use the information in the %tim tier to computer anything.  Instead, as the manual notes, the TIMEDUR program specifically relies on information in the time bullets for each utterance.  I am afraid I can’t think of any work around to help you out on this.  The closest I could imagine is to use KWAL to output all of the %tim lines from each file separately to a single data file that then goes into a sheet in EXCEL or something like that.  However, I can’t think of any way of doing this inside CLAN, because our programs are dependent on using information in the time bullets.

—Brian MacWhinney

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[Brian Verdine]

Thanks Brian!  This is not that different from the reply I thought I might be in for...

I am sure I can get some output from something like KWAL that can make the calculation easier than having to open each and hand calculate, but at least now I know there is nothing built-in that I am missing or that I'm not doing something wrong with headers or tiers.

[Nicole Tracy-Ventura]

Brian, I think you might be able to do what you want if you convert your files to ELAN. The chat2elan command will do this for you (I did yours - see attached). When you open your file in ELAN it will ask to locate the media file. You can click cancel. Then when your file opens, look under the Grid tab, select tim@PAR and see if what is gives you is what you're after.  If so, you can export that to Excel and work from there.  I mostly work with CHAT files but do this occasionally for certain analyses. 

Good luck,

Nicole

Nicole Tracy-Ventura

Assistant Professor

Department of World Languages

University of South Florida

4202 East Fowler Ave, CPR419

Tampa, FL 33620-5700

Email: n...@usf.edu

 

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[Brian Verdine]

Thanks.  I've never messed with ELAN but I'll give it a try when I get a chance.

Best,

Brian