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Similar software for fieldlinguistics
There are tons of tools that already exist and work really well for what they are designed for, and which we don't want to "re-invent."
We have already talked about them but, let's use this wiki page to keep track of them, and what they are designed to do... so that we can learn from them and not reinvent the wheel where the wheel does not need to be reinvented. Even if the software is not really doing what we want, let's list it because chances are we can learn about where the technology failed, or where the approach failed or would fail if we apply it to our project.
- http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~karuk/index.php
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- Benefits: we should contact its users to find out more what they love and dont love... see if there are any lessons to be learned here.
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- Pitfalls: Made in php, doesn't run offline
- http://washo.uchicago.edu/dictionary/dictionary.php
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- Benefits: we should contact its users to find out more what they love and dont love... see if there are any lessons to be learned here. Seems to strike a good balance between constraining the data entries, generating a dictionary for heritage speakers and endangered languages. Definitely some good stuff here.
- *Pitfalls: Made in php, doesn't run offline. Could use some AJAX love (ie, mouse over, hover and other actions to make morphological glosses more friendly to the eyes..)
- https://web.chass.utoronto.ca/inuitweb/stories/sentences/index/3
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- Benefits: written in Ruby on Rails! Good framework choice
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- Pitfalls: it doesn't run offline. we need to ask its users what other lessons we can learn...
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- Benefits: Pretty easy to start using, has smart morphological glossing, can build towards a corpus, a grammar or a lexicon. All around, an excellent tool.
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- Pitfalls: Runs only on Windows computers so cannot be shared on team with Mac users.
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FLEx / FieldWorks is the new Toolbox: http://fieldworks.sil.org/flex/
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- PC-only, not easy to collaborate with others. But not in the comments section of this page something called FieldWorks that is supposed to be broader?
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FieldWorks aka FLEx
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- Benefits: FieldWorks looks to be very comprehensive, and a good replacement for ToolBox. It runs on Linux but not as well as Windows. The bug tracker to be very informative of the types of bugs that we need to be ready to fix if we have users: http://linux.lsdev.sil.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__open__&product=FieldWorks&content= Good screen casts which explain how they have laid out the software: http://downloads.sil.org/FieldWorks/Movies/Demo%20Movies.html
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- Pitfalls: Collaboration anecdote from Gretchen: "Oklahoma were collaborating with FLEx by putting it on a central server which in theory they were all supposed to be able to edit. However, in practice they found that it would crash if more than one of them was using it at the same time, so they had to coordinate update times which apparently was a nuisance. I think they were hoping that future versions of FLEx would fix this. So I guess there's some collaboration ability possible with FLEx, but it's not great."
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FileMaker Pro http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~jcgood/bifocal/FileMakerRev.html
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- Benefits: customizable and programmable. Many departments/teams hired a programer to make it into a proper grammar building tool. Made by a company so its supported and maintained, and likely to continue to be supported and maintained. Seems to have a web publishing feature
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- Pitfalls: long standing history, unicode is a new addition, proprietary format (although it seems to be e exportable in .csv)
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TextSTAT http://neon.niederlandistik.fu-berlin.de/en/textstat/
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- This isn't really a database software -- it's more for concordances, word-frequency, and other stats/analysis on a text file. It's simple and very lightweight and good at the few things it does.
There are more projects/software reviewed here
- Field database (made in cold fusion) http://emeld.org/school/workroom/lexicon/index.html
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- Benefits: constrains user input, choose language from the ethnologue, choose categories from a list of predefined categories (why dont they have a distinction between light verb and verb?)
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- Pitfalls: made in cold fusion, was built in the era of Internet Explorer 6. It took me 10 minutes to add the word for "donkey" to my lexicon...when i wanted to add an inflected form it took literally 5 minutes(!) to get to the next page. Obviously there is a big crunching system behind it. We don't want to make this mistake.
Please add more! Try to be objective and constructive. What are the best features? What is missing? How hard is it to do what is missing (ie, why is it missing)? Why doesn't it work for our project? Is the reason technological, or ideological?