Software Quick Start Guide

Challenge

A university research team needed to hire and train staff for a short-term project using a linguistic annotation software package that nobody on the annotation team had used before. The existing guidelines for the software proved too complex and too cumbersome to be practical for training new project staff in a short timeframe, particularly since the team needed to use the software for a different purpose than the one it was originally created for. 

Project planning, hiring, and training of new staff needed to happen very quickly in order for the first phase of the project to be finished within six weeks. Some aspects of the standard operating procedures were still under development and subject to change. Training materials needed to be in an easily accessible format that could be updated without any kind of special access or subscription.

Solution

This software quick start guide gives step-by-step instructions and examples of the AMR Editor functions that the team expects to use most often. It provides answers to the most common annotation questions. It is designed to be used together with a project-specific set of annotation guidelines, which are proprietary and are not posted here. It took two weeks to learn the software, meet with subject matter experts, and refine the work process. It took one day to make the quick start guide.

Note: Some material has been removed from this guide because it is proprietary and could not be shared publicly.

Results

Training time for new staff members was cut in half. Training became much more efficient, since staff no longer needed to use a time-consuming "trial and error" method to figure out how to use the annotation tool.