CALPIU Newsletter March 2010
The CALPIU storehouse
The major piece of news we have to share with you is that we have been very busy setting up the infrastructure for our CALPIU storehouse.
We envisage the storehouse as a storage facility and ‘lending library’ where CALPIU-affiliated researchers can store their data and share it with others.
It is the researcher submitting the data to the storehouse who grants the relevant rights for other researchers to use the data. When a researcher has finished working with a particular data set, it can be made available, with conditions if necessary, to other researchers. In turn, researchers can themselves gain access to, and be allowed to use, other researchers’ data. This will be a cumulative process during the lifespan of the CALPIU centre.
If you would like to contribute data to the storehouse, or if you would like to know more about the possibilities of accessing data in the storehouse, please write an email to calpiu@ruc.dk.
Data types
The CALPIU storehouse contains ‘raw’ data (video files and audio files) and transcriptions of raw data, arranged into folders organised according to the identity of the researcher who collected the data. We take the position that the form of data CALPIU wants to use and promote consists of recorded material plus linked transcriptions.
That is, it is essentially a spoken data corpus which stores video+audio files and their accompanying transcript files. Generally, we also prefer video data to ‘pure’ audio data, since video data is suited for a wider range of analytical purposes (for instance the analysis of gesture). Therefore, although you may not need video data yourself, we encourage you to consider collecting video data if video recordings do not actually interfere negatively with the data collection process.
At a later stage, the storehouse may also be used to store written data (for instance university policy documents) but so far, we have been focusing on how to handle audio and video files, because most of the CALPIU projects currently running use spoken data.
The CALPIU Lab: tools and formats
Apart from the storehouse, we have also established the ‘CALPIU Lab’, which to a modest extent, provides transcription assistance for CALPIU research projects. We have employed six student transcribers who are working hard on transcribing the first incoming data.
All transcriptions at the CALPIU lab are made using CLAN software (www.talkbank.org). CLAN is a comparatively user-friendly freeware software package which makes it easy to link transcripts to audio and video data. Together with the transcription conventions we have adopted (a simplified version of the CA conventions developed for CLAN), and the method we have prescribed in using these conventions, CLAN allows for making both fine- grained as well as very basic transcriptions.
Hence, it is equally well suited for Conversation Analysis or language alternation analysis on the one end of the scale as it is for making basic ‘content-only’ transcriptions of interviews and focus group discussions on the other. Furthermore, it allows coarsely grained transcriptions to be upgraded seamlessly later to more fine-grained ones.
We are also in the process of adding the finishing touches to the first version of the Instruction Manual for CALPIU transcribers, which explains the CLAN programme step-by-step for our student transcribers and gives them directions for the CALPIU transcription conventions.
We encourage all CALPIU associates to use CLAN for transcription purposes, and we are more than willing to share our experience with the programme, including the CALPIU CLAN manual. It is not a requirement that transcripts submitted to the CALPIU storehouse are produced in CLAN, but if CLAN is not used, we strongly prefer transcripts that are produced in a program that links the transcript to the data source (e.g. ELAN or EXMARaLDA). Transcripts in Microsoft Word should be avoided.
Video data submitted to the CALPIU storehouse should preferably be in .mov format. Audio files should preferably be in .wav format. We strongly discourage the use of highly compressed sound formats like .mp3.
Data collection: three forms
We have created three forms dealing with the ethical and logistic aspects of data collection, which we encourage all our research partners to use. We will provide links to these forms below, and recommend that all researchers adapt these to their purposes and use them when collecting CALPIU relevant data. These forms also constitute the baseline for what we require in connection with submitting data to the CALPIU storehouse.
The idea behind the CALPIU storehouse is of course that other researchers can benefit from your data and that you can benefit from their data, so when you hand in data it is very important that they are accompanied by consent forms from all participants (respondents and informants). You should also hand in a log file with the file name and name of the researcher, etc. The form to be used will be made available in due course.
Status on your individual projects
We have made a webpage on www.calpiu.dk, where your research project is listed, please see here:
http://imw.ruc.dk//calpiu/calpiu/research-projects.
If you have corrections, please write to calpiu@ruc.dk The list of participants in the CALPIU research network is available at
http://imw.ruc.dk//calpiu/calpiu/Participants.
The list provides links to the researchers’ individual pages. If for some reason you don’t want this linking to apply to you, please let us know at the CALPIU research centre (calpiu@ruc.dk).
We would also be very interested in knowing where you are in your projects, so we can better coordinate research resources such as transcriber time, and hope that you will be willing to send us a short email within the near future.
CALPIU posters available at calpiu.dk
A small group from CALPIU recently attended the Luxembourg conference on Professionalising multilingualism in higher education (4-6 February 2010) and presented our network and research center there. The presentation was supported by a .ppt show and three posters in French, German and English.
The colour posters were printed in A0 format (roughly 80 x 120 cm) and were very decorative. If you want to add a CALPIU touch to some empty walls at your institution, you are welcome to download the files here and print them out and adorn a wall with them (or a selection of them).
We hope this newsletter and the accompanying documents have been useful and we thank you for participating in the CALPIU research endeavour.
Best regards,
Bent Preisler, Anne Fabricius, Hartmut Haberland, Janus Mortensen
The CALPIU steering committee