5 Stages of the Digital Notebook Method

1. Preparation Stage

  • Make a plan for your elicitation session and the type of data you hope to collect
  • Create a session folder and session-specific digital notebook spreadsheet

2. Elicitation Stage

  • Work with a speaker to create transcriptions and add metadata into the digital notebook spreadsheet.
  • Feel free to ask the speaker for additional meta-linguistic information about elicited data
  • You can optionally create an audio(-visual) recording of this stage for your reference.

3. Recording Stage

  • Using the digital notebook spreadsheet as a foundation, create a recording spreadsheet that is designed specifically for a structured elicitation.
  • Ask the speaker to practice repeating elicited items multiple times and/or pausing between elicited items.
  • Create an audio(-visual) recording of the speaker producing all of the items in the recording spreadsheet in the same order in which they appear in the spreadsheet, with no discussion or other metalinguistic information in the recording.

4. Processing

  • Backup your recordings on multiple storage devices and optionally cloud storage.
  • Using Praat, open your recording and automatically segment the audio by using Annotate → To TextGrid (silences)…
  • Save the TextGrid as a text file.
  • Copy the Digital Notebook Data Merger script to the same folder as your recoding spreadsheet and TextGrid file.
  • Run the script to create time-aligned annotations in .EAF, .TextGrid, and .TXT formats.

5. Archiving

  • Deposit the recording, digital notebook spreadsheet, .EAF, .TextGrid, and .TXT files with your archive.