TORTOISEHG WORKBENCH WINDOWS LOST FILE SOFTWARE

First, we are working mainly with very large quantities of plain text files: source code files in the case of software, natural-language text files in the case of corpora.

TORTOISEHG WORKBENCH WINDOWS LOST FILE SOFTWARE

Though software development and corpus construction are quite different animals, in two critical respects they are similar. The problems of collaboration and version tracking also affect the work of software developers – with the difference that for them, these problems have been quite thoroughly solved.

In this blog post I’d like to suggest a better way! To deal with the problem of recording the history of the data, we often resort to saving multiple different versions of the data, creating a new copy of the whole corpus every time we make any tiny change, and adding an ever-growing pile of “v1”, “v2” “v3”… suffixes to the filenames.

To deal with the problem of collaboration, we email bundles of files back and forth, or used shared directories on our institutional networks, or rely on external cloud services like Dropbox. Typically corpus linguists have used ad hoc solutions to these problems. First, how do two or more people pool their efforts simultaneously on this kind of work – sharing the data as it develops without working at cross-purposes, repeating effort, or ending up with incompatible versions of the corpus? Second, how do we keep track of what changes in the corpus as it grows and approaches completion – and in particular, if mistakes get made, how do we make sure we can undo them? There are two problems that often come up in collaborative efforts towards corpus construction.

Tortoisehg workbench windows lost file