Spencer's new browser
Brian MacWhinney
Spencer Sugarman has built a new way of playing back BilingBank
and other TalkBank interactions over the web direct from your
browser. The only catch is that your browser has to be Firefox and
you have to have JavaScript enabled. However, if you can use Firefox
on a broadband connection, then I think you will find this facility
really great. To try it out, just go to http://talkbank.org and click
on the link to the bottom left called Browser Access. The browser
plug-in will start up and you will get instructions on how to
proceed. If you click on BilingBank or other folders you will log in
and then see some more folders. Let's say you pick first BilingBank,
then Dresden, then French, and then fr321_2.cha. Once the transcript
opens up, just double click on a line and the audio will play in
sync. The system will scroll through the transcript and turn pages as
you go. Currently BilingBank is largely linked to audio, rather than
video, but many of the other corpora on TalkBank, such as ClassBank
rely heavily on video.
Personally, I really love this way of accessing and browsing the
interactions. We are also developing a system within this facility
for commenting on the interactions. More about that later.
Best wishes and comments invited,
-- Brian MacWhinney