I’m piloting a 3-hour CEU workshop that trains interpreters to detect prosodic cues and reduction patterns in ASL using ELAN-coded corpus clips, and I’d like input on what would be most useful to practice. We’ll segment 15 short narratives and compute inter-annotator agreement on holds, movement epenthesis, and gaze shifts; does this kind of data-driven drill map to your real-time decisions in VRS or legal work?
Short example: in a 3‑hour ELAN session, we did a blind first pass tagging only gaze shifts, then a second pass for holds and movement epenthesis — mixing them at once drives me nuts and tanks consistency. If you’re doing “inter-annotator agreement,” lock down operational definitions (e.g., “contact settle >200 ms” counts as a hold) and add a 5‑minute live retell from one of the 15 clips to check transfer to real work. Quick ELAN tip: share a tier template with hotkeys for HOLD/ME/GAZE so keystrokes are uniform; docs if helpful: ELAN | The Language Archive.
One thing that boosted our IAA in a 3-hour ELAN workshop was a 5‑minute calibration: we set ELAN tier controlled vocab for “holds,” “movement epenthesis,” and “gaze shifts,” then annotated a 30‑second clip together before tackling your “15 short narratives.” Small caveat: without the controlled vocab and a shared example, reduction labels drift fast and the drill doesn’t transfer cleanly to live work.
For your ELAN-coded clips, add a 60-second ‘anchor clip’ check every 3 narratives; prevents IAA drift without slowing pace.
Quick tip from running a three-hour CEU with ELAN: before any tagging, we did a 20-second ‘silent rewatch’ of each clip to foreground beat timing and subtle holds/transitions, and our agreement jumped without adding lecture time. With 15 narratives you won’t have minutes to spare, so use it every other clip if the clock’s tight.