EXMARaLDA is a system for working with oral corpora on a computer. It consists of a transcription and annotation tool (Partitur-Editor), a tool for managing corpora (Corpus-Manager) and a query and analysis tool (EXAKT). Further parts of EXMARaLDA are FOLKER and OrthoNormal, which were both developed in and for the FOLK project.
EXMARaLDA’s features include, for instance:
- time-aligned transcription of digital audio or video
- flexible annotation for freely choosable categories,
- systematic documentation of a corpus through metadata
- flexible output of transcription data in various layouts and formats (notation, document)
- computer-assisted querying of transcription, annotation and metadata
- interoperable as it works XML based data formats that allow for data exchange with other tools (like Praat, ELAN, Transcriber etc.) and enable a flexible processing and sustainable usage of the data.
EXMARaLDA is used by researchers world wide in different contexts in which spoken language is analysed, these include:
- conversation and discourse analysis,
- study of language acquisition and multilingualism,
- phonetics and phonology,
- dialectology and sociolinguistics.
EXMARaLDA was developed in the project “Computer assisted methods for the creation and analysis of multilingual data” at the Collaborative Research Center “Multilingualism” (Sonderforschungsbereich “Mehrsprachigkeit” – SFB 538) at the University of Hamburg. Afterwards, development was continued at the Archive for Spoken German at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim in cooperation with the Hamburg Centre for Language Corpora until 2021. Currently, EXMARaLDA is maintained and developed by linguisticbits.de. EXMARaLDA is hosted as an open source project on GitHub.
Please cite EXMARaLDA by referring to the website (www.exmaralda.org) and the latest publication describing the system, which is:
Schmidt T and Wörner K (2014), “EXMARaLDA”, In Handbook on Corpus Phonology, pp. 402-419. Oxford University Press.