Participant naming convention

[nikopartanen]

We write now in Wiki that participant naming conventions can be project specific. I was just thinking that maybe we should have a common convention to name unknown/multiple speakers? We have some older texts, for example those from Castrén and Fokos-Fuchs, for who we cannot really identify any individual speaker, nor can we be sure that they wouldn't be elicitated from a group of people. I've now used conventions like:

bundle:castren
bundle:fokos

Which basically means by "bundle" a group of people with who we know Castrén was dealing with, but I don't know if "bundle" is a stupid term or not. "group", "speakers", "multiple_participants"? This could be easily changed. In an ideal world it would be part of documentation that in Castrén's case we know those must have been older women, and with Fokos this must refer to group of middle-aged male speakers, as those are listed somewhere, just not associated with individual texts. It is a different question how to store information like this so that it would be foundable and easy to retrieve, but it is a start to name it so that everyone understands what's going on.

For unknown individual speakers I use something like XXX-X-19XX. Not ideal maybe, but those cases aren't too common either.

So just thinking whether anyone else is having thought about this. This system is really set up in ad-hoc manner so I'm more than happy to make it better.

[jeutzsch]

one idea: tierName@unknown or tierName@unknownGroup

[nikopartanen]

This is a very good convention, it can be kept very simple. This just comes with the question whether we want to store information about different "unknowns" and their groupings. I mean it can be that several sessions have a same unknown person, who is different from unknown in some other session. I guess one solution is also just to avoid processing this kind of data too far before metadata is more thorough, as the usability of this data is anyway lower than that where the speaker can be identified.