Intro Quickstart Manual Download softwareELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator) is a multimedia annotation tool developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. ELAN is constantly being improved and elaborated; the most recent version can be found at the MPI web site. We recommend that you always download the new versions as they become available. New versions will be announced on the ELAN mailing list.
ELAN supports linguistic resources that consist of media tracks and separate annotation layers that contain linguistically relevant descriptions of events that occur within the media tracks. The media signal, audio and/or video, is displayed together with annotations. Those annotations can be exactly aligned with media time. Furthermore, ELAN allows for an unlimited numbers of annotation tiers to be defined by the user. This means that users can compose their own tier setup, including the definition of new annotation layer types.
By default, the ELAN interface will be set to English, but several other languages are available: currently Dutch, German, Swedish, Spanish, and Catalan. If you would be interested in translating the interface to your own language, you can contact the ELAN developers.
If annotated corpora are available, researchers may want to inspect only the parts of a corpus that meet specific search criteria. The most recent version of ELAN allows you to search annotations within and across documents, to display the results and to quickly jump to the corresponding annotation in the ELAN window. It is possible to search on the precise alignment (or sequencing) of annotations on different tiers. Also, you can search for sequences of utterances, words or other annotations on the same tier.
The ELAN annotation tool is based on an open architecture and file format. The application currently is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms. The software can be downloaded for free from the MPI website.
The Quickstart Manual on this web site can help you to start using ELAN, in addition to the official manual and a getting-started quide for sign language users in mind. When you first install ELAN, we recommend that you look at existing ELAN transcriptions before starting to annotate your own data: this will help you to get a feel for the possibilities that the programme offers. Please address all questions about ELAN to the ELAN mailing list, to which you can subscribe by clicking this link (which will open an email message with a subscription request).