Exercise (Tutorial)

To get acquainted with ITE, try the following:

  1. Start ITE and create a new document.
  2. Click on the Sentence tab.
  3. In the upper text field, enter the following phonological transcription la e la pʁəmjɛʁ fʁaz. (The transcription contains non-roman characters, so the easiest way to enter it is to copy it from your web browser window into the ITE text field. If the IPA characters do not appear, you may need to install a Unicode font). In the lower text field type the translation: There is the first sentence.
  4. With the cursor in the transcription field, click on the right mouse button and choose sentence > words from the contextual menu.
  5. Click on the Word tab. In the word-level editing window, each word transcription is presented in a text field, where it can be modified. Under each text field is a menu for entering or changing the word gloss.
  6. Open the glossing menu under the first word, la. A menu appears listing a selection of previously used glosses to choose from (there are none) and a text field for entering a new gloss. Choose the option other gloss.... Enter the gloss there (and hit ENTER).
  7. Open the glossing menu under the word e and enter the gloss is.
  8. When you get to the second la and choose other gloss..., ITE fills in the gloss there. But this la means "the", so modify "there" to "the" (or choose other gloss... and enter the).
  9. Finish glossing sentence 1 as follows:
    transcription gloss
    la there
    e is
    la the
    pʁəmjɛʁ first
    fʁaz sentence
  10. With the cursor in an empty part of the word-level editing window (but not in a word frame), hold down the right mouse button and choose insert sentence from the contextual menu.
  11. Click on the Sentence tab. Enter the transcription: e la e la døzjɛm fʁaz and the translation: And there is the second sentence.
  12. With the cursor in the transcription field, hold down the right mouse button and choose sentence > words to make a word-level transcription.
  13. Click on the Word tab.
  14. This time the program has some examples of glossed words in memory from sentence 1, so you can ask it to suggest glosses. In the lower left corner of the window, click on the Glossing. button. The program goes through the sentence word by word and does the following:
    • if it has never seen the transcription of a word, it skips to the next one.
    • if it has one (and only one) gloss in memory for a transcription, it fills it in and goes on to the next one.
    • if it has more than one gloss for a transcription, it stops and opens a small dialog window to ask you to choose the one you want, before going on to the next word. (If you don't like the glosses proposed, you can write one in.)
  15. In the present case, ITE glosses the first word (note the dark frame around it) and a small window opens and prompts you to choose a gloss for w[2] (the second word), la.
    illustration
    Glossing: the tool has glossed the first word and prompts a dialog to choose a gloss for the second word.
    The program proposes two glosses, there and the. Choose there.
    (If for some reason you don't want to choose a gloss, the skip button will make the program skip the item and continue glossing the rest of the sentence. The close button interrupts the glossing process completely. It can be restarted later.)
  16. The glossing tool now glosses e (the third word) and opens another small window, for w[4], la again. Choose the gloss the. this time. The tool glosses fʁaz and quits. It skips words it doesn't know, so it leaves the word døzjɛm unglossed.
  17. All the words that have been glossed in the current run of the glossing tool (whether prompted or not) are framed so you can check the result. The next to last word of the sentence is still unglossed (note that its frame is lighter in color than the others). Fill in the gloss second for the word døzjɛm.
  18. CHECK THE RESULT: For e, the first word in the sentence, ITE has filled in the gloss is, which you entered for e in sentence one. But e here is a different word, meaning and. To change the gloss, click on the gloss box, select the option other gloss... and enter the gloss and. It's up to the user to check for such errors. (Note that the gloss is is correct for the third word of the sentence.)
  19. Save your annotation using the Save option in the File menu of the editing window. It will be saved as an XML file -- you can call it MySample.xml.
  20. Before closing the document, check out the ITE indexing tools. (These will be presented in more detail later.)
    • GLOSSARY: To see the glossary ITE has been building, choose Lexicon from the Tools menu of the main window. You can sort the lexicon by transcription or by gloss by clicking on the appropriate column header.
    • CONCORDANCE: To see a concordance of your text, choose Concordance from the Tools menu of the main window. In the parameter window, leave the options as is, except for increasing the Number of words meter to 3 or more. To sort the concordance by keyword, click on the item column header.
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