Sketch Grammars and Studies
For a first introduction to the languages in the archive, all grammars and grammatical sketches contained in the archive can be accessed here. Additionally, there are a number of studies by the DOBES teams on the languages in the archive.
Archive Structure and Formats
The archive contains sessions consisting of audio and video recordings usually with annotations as .eaf or text files. Each session is described with Imdi-metadata. The DOBES archive consists of many subarchives, one per documentation project and these subarchives consist of a tree structure that contains the sessions sorted often by topic. The structure of the archive trees varies according to the foci of the respective documentation project.
Similarly, the annotations have not been standardized and may vary in the conventions used (for tier names, glossing, …). So it would be best, to first browse the archive for a bit and conduct some exploratory searches in order to get a feel for what is there and what it looks like.
Tools for Typologists
- Annex Search
- For statistical analyses of DOBES data the Introduction to R for Typologists by Balthasar Bickel will be very helpful.
- More Software for Typologists by Balthasar Bickel
- The Guide to Regular Expressions for ELAN users by Ulrike Mosel collects useful regular expressions for the analysis of Elan-files.
- The Poio Analyzer by Peter Bouda allows to search and analyze batches of Elan and Toolbox files.
Cross-Corpus Projects
A number of projects have been granted that work on a joint research question across different corpora. These will likely develop methods and tools useful for other cross-corpus research ventures.