Toolbox

Submitted by languist on Fri, 10/31/2008 - 18:03
Your rating: None Average: 3.1 (9 votes)

Toolbox is a data management and analysis tool for field linguists. It is especially useful for maintaining lexical data, and for parsing and interlinearizing text, but it can be used to manage virtually any kind of data.

If you have experience with the Field Linguist's Shoebox, you can think of Toolbox as an enhanced version of Shoebox with a new name. It is fully compatible with Shoebox. You can install Toolbox and use it just as you used Shoebox, with virtually no difference. Because Toolbox is an enhanced version of Shoebox, it is sometimes referred to as Shoebox/Toolbox.

Toolbox is a text-oriented database management system with added functionality designed to meet the needs of a field linguist. The underlying dbms offers full user flexibililty in the design of any type of database. But for ease of use, the Toolbox package includes prepared database definitions for a typical dictionary and text corpus.

The Toolbox database management system offers powerful functionality like customized sorting, multiple views of the same database, browse view to show data in tabular form, and filtering to show subsets of a database. It can handle any number of scripts in the same database. Each script has its own font and sorting characteristics. While Unicode is preferred, Toolbox can handle scripts in most legacy encoding systems.

Toolbox also has powerful linguistic functionality. It includes a morphological parser that can handle almost all types of morphophonemic processes. It has a word formula component that allows the linguist to describe all the possible affix patterns that occur in words. It has a user-definable interlinear text generation system which uses the morphological parser and lexicon to generate annotated text. Interlinear text can be exported in a form suitable for use in linguistic papers. Toolbox has export capabilities that can be used to produce a publishable dictionary from a dictionary database.

Although Toolbox is very powerful, it is designed to be easy to learn. The user can start with a simple standard setup and gradually add the use of more powerful features as desired. The Toolbox downloads include a training package that is usable for self-paced individual learning as well as for classroom teaching of Toolbox.

Version

 1.5.x

Developer

 SIL

Supported
free
email author

Supported Operating Systems

 Windows, Wine under Linux, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Vista x64, Windows 7, Windows 7 x64

Unicode Support
Yes

Suitable tasks
  • SOCIOLINGUISTICS: Surveying and assessing the sociolinguistic situation
  • Collect word lists using IPA transcription and/or audio recording
  • ANTHROPOLOGY
  • Store and edit an electronic data notebook of cultural events in a form conducive to qualitative analysis
  • LINGUISTICS
  • Store and edit an electronic notebook of language data in a form conducive to analysis
  • Create and edit a lexical database (modeling morphology if necessary)
  • Create and edit a corpus of natural texts
  • Collect, transcribe and translate audiorecordings of natural texts (and other texts/utterances)
  • From the text corpus, look up words in the lexicon
  • Interlinearize natural texts, sharing glosses with a lexical database
  • Define dictionary entries while grouping them together by semantic domain
  • Run a concordance search to find all occurrences of a given word in a text corpus
  • Supply additional information such as word category, example sentences, lexical relations
  • Publish linguistic data (e.g. phonetic data and interlinear texts)
  • GENERAL TRANSLATION
  • SCRIPTURE TRANSLATION
  • Create and edit Scripture database(s) to contain the translation, exegetical notes, test results, back translation, team notes, and consultant notes
  • Create and edit drafts of books directly
  • Interlinearize the translation, glossing it in an LWC
  • COMMON: Common Tasks and Foundational Technologies/Utilities
  • Localizable (i.e. user interface can be translated)
  • Manipulate data (e.g. SFM or XML)

Interface Language
English, French, Indonesian

License
SIL Language Freeware EULA

Download Page
http://www.sil.org/computing/toolbox/downloads.htm

Website
http://www.sil.org/computing/toolbox/

User Group
Shoebox/Toolbox Field Linguist's Toolbox

Screenshots

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Toolbox is a tool that is

Submitted by dhigby on Fri, 10/31/2008 - 23:38.

Toolbox is a tool that is well respected in academic communities, but the user menus and options can be daunting to the new user.

Increasingly frustrated

Submitted by languist on Thu, 07/23/2009 - 12:09.

Although I'm grateful for Toolbox and all the functionality it has provided throughout years when other software wasn't available, it hasn't improved a lot in recent years, and I've become increasingly frustrated with its quirks and bugs. It doesn't parse off clitics or inflectional affixes very satisfactorily, and it tends to save things that it shouldn't without asking. (E.g. "Lock Project" doesn't do what I'd expect it to.)I've had to make a habit of backing up my entire project directory before launching Toolbox, because if I don't, and one of the files I last had open is no longer in the same location as before, I am FORCED to find it right then and there. I cannot cancel opening the project, and if I try to do so, all windows, jump paths and interlinear settings that reference that missing file are permanently deleted. (One workaround is to temporarily create a dummy file and "find" it.)Toolbox does provide range sets and can "display hierarchy" to some extent, but for the most part it does not help the user to enter data consistently, nor to understand and use the MDF hierarchy properly.New users seem to be happier with FLEx (FieldWorks) or even WeSay, though there are still some issues with those tools as well. There are many users who have already learned how to manage their Toolbox project(s) adequately. I don't push these users strongly in either direction, but many of them are expressing interest in at least using SOLID to prepare their data for archival, and possibly for migration.