Going forward, and if continued funding allows of course, I would love to support some more FAIR and open data interoperability with existing formats within DOTE & DOTEbase.

We felt that this particular suit of tools was desperately needed by many qualitative researchers looking to easily and efficiently manage their data, with the intent of cataloguing findings and producing publishable transcripts.

You are absolutely correct that DOTE is primarily line-based transcription tool, with close tie-ins to Jeffersonian & Mondadian conventions for the display of sequentiality. And DOTEbase adds a time-based media annotation layer, and tools for managing and searching through ones personal data sets.

The aim for our Media-Clip's were to allow a qualitative researcher to make time-based notes on the findings within their data. So while one could certainly create & visualize micro-sequentiality with our Clips-Oragniser tool, it might feel a little clunky to produce, when compared to ELAN.

However I am uncertain if the design of our UI is conducive to the type of dense turn-based sequentiality that one is accustomed to in ELAN. We knew that there were already good tools for creating score-based transcripts, so we didn't feel like we needed to reproduce all of that functionality.

- We don't force the user to put a Clip on any specific Tier (or even define any tiers at all), so a default 'unnamed' Tier would have to be created to hold un-tiered Clips.

- We allow Clips to overlap in time on a given Tier. So when converting to eaf-format we would likely create sub-tiers to hold instances of overlaps on a Tier.

The following caveats would apply when converting Media-Clips to EAF format:
- Extra meta-data associated with a Media-Clip-Annotation would be lost (Tags & User-Defined kay-value pairs, etc)

Therefore it should be fairly easy to add an import/export option to our Media Clips Organiser for very basic interoperability with eaf files.

Thanks for paper, I had a quick read through it. I also read through the eaf-file spec. - I think our Media-Clips (which are time-based annotations) seem to be very compatible with the format of ELAN's .eaf files, at least from a technical standpoint. (see image)

A brief google search gave me this PDF as a spec for EAF v2.7: www.mpi.nl/tools/elan/E...
However it is dated 2010.
Would you happen to know if this the most recent spec document?

If our new Media-Clip and Transcript-Clip annotations in DOTEbase fall short in some way for your particular research / data-set, I'd be curious to hear what missing.
Also, if you are looking at building some cross-compatibility / conversion tool, I'd be happy to discuss the data-structures we use.

- Transcript-Clips allow annotations (and tags, etc) to be applied to a specific *range* of text within a Transcript (from small parts of a line, to multi-line).
- As before, Sync-Codes simply connect the start of a line of transcript to moment in time.

With the addition of DOTEbase to our software suite, we have added two additional ways to make annotations to Projects:
- Media-Clips allow annotations (and tags, etc) to be applied to a specific *spans* of time (via start & stop points) applied to the timeline of a Project.