Depositors who are arranging their materials for self-depositing at AILLA may have questions about how their materials should be organized. This page outlines a few common arrangement strategies and provides links to examples of collections or resources that were arranged according to these strategies.

Note that AILLA has a three-level structure: AILLA collections are made up of resources that contain media files. The resources are like folders or directories on your hard drive since and are containers for files. Unlike the file structure of your own drives, resources cannot contain other resources in AILLA. This means that you may have to rearrange your materials if they are currently have a nested structure.

Note also that the organization schemes mentioned below do not need to be used uniformly across an entire collection–if one scheme works for one portion of your collection and another scheme makes sense for the rest, then you can use both.

Resources organized by recording event

The most common organization scheme in AILLA and many other digital language data collections is organization by recording event. In this system, the audio and video files for each recording session (be it the recording of a narrative, an elicitation session, etc.) will be placed in a folder along with any annotation files (transcriptions, translations, etc.) or supplementary materials relating to the recording session (such as photographs, documents detailing elicitation stimuli, etc.).

Resources organized by experimental protocol

Perhaps the next most common organization strategy is to place all materials collected as part of an experimental protocol or linguistic survey together in one resource. One such resource could include materials recorded in different times and locations and featuring different people and even different languages, but will be united by the common elicitation protocol or prompt. This organization is useful because these materials can be more easily described together–rather than repeating their descriptions across many resources–and future AILLA users will likely want to reuse all of these materials at once, for example if verifying or replicating your work.

• Isthmus Zapotec Collection of Randi Moore https://ailla.utexas.org/islandora/object/ailla:257693

Other possible organization strategies

Organization by genre

Some collections feature certain genres or styles of language use, and collections can be organized around these. For example, a depositor may want to group all the songs they recorded in one resource, all the prayers in another, etc.

Organization by linguistic phenomenon

Depositors with large amounts of grammatical elicitation material may want to consider grouping materials together by linguistic phenomenon featured in the materials.

• Interrogatives. Chatino Collection of Ryan Sullivant
  • https://ailla.utexas.org/islandora/object/ailla:243608

Organization by location

Depositors who collected data in numerous locations may want to consider creating resources for each of the locations.

• Three sets of experimental stimuli bundled by recording location. Tseltal Documentation Project of Gilles Polian,
  • https://ailla.utexas.org/islandora/object/ailla:274149
  • https://ailla.utexas.org/islandora/object/ailla:274168
  • https://ailla.utexas.org/islandora/object/ailla:274024

Organization by participant

Collections whose materials feature a large number of participants may choose to create resources for each participant's contributions. This type of organization highlights the participants.

Organization by publication

You may want to make a resource containing all and only the materials referenced in a journal article, book chapter, or other publication. You may also choose to include a digital copy of the publication itself in the resource, in accordance with your agreements with the publisher.

• San Mateo Ixtatán Chuj. Survey of the Indigenous Languages of Mexico.
  • https://ailla.utexas.org/islandora/object/ailla:132889