HomeBank Contributing Data

HomeBank provides a way for researchers to share their daylong (or otherwise large) audio recordings of children's natural environments. This includes recordings made using the LENA system as well as recordings made using other recording methods.

If you are interested in contributing data to HomeBank, it is important to plan in advance how you will configure your informed consent form to permit inclusion in HomeBank. Advice and example consent forms are available here.

Contribution Process

  1. First, please email 4homebank@gmail.com to let us know you are interested in contributing and to tell us a little bit about your dataset. That way we can customize the process described below to fit your dataset and to make things as easy as possible for you.
  2. If your data will be password-protected, you should begin the process of becoming a HomeBank member. This process is described here. You do not have to complete the process before beginning the following steps, but you will need to be a member if you wish to view your data within HomeBank once it is ready.
  3. Print out this contribution form , complete it, scan it, and email it to ljarold@andrew.cmu.edu. (Submitted release forms are stored here.)
  4. Provide us with information about your corpus. We will create a Google spreadsheet using this template where you can enter required as well as optional information.
  5. Please organize your files into a separate folder for each participant. The name of each folder should be a 3- or 4-character code of your choosing for that participant. For LENA data, inside the participant's folders you would put the .its and .wav file for each recording for that participant. The names for the .its and .wav files should have the 3- or 4-character code followed by the age in the YYMMDD format, as in 0003-010224.wav for a file for subject 0003 at age 1;02.24.
  6. Once you have data organized in this way, send an email to Brian MacWhinney at macw@cmu.edu and he will send you a link for transferring files using WeTransfer.com
  7. Once everything is in place, we will create a webpage for your corpus, along with a DOI number, and we can announce the addition of the new corpus to the DARCLE and HomeBank lists. Please take a look at a web page such as the one here to see what information we will need for that page. You don't need to create HTML, just please provide the information for us to make the page.

Thank you again for your interest in contributing to HomeBank! Please don't hesitate to contact us at 4homebank@gmail.com if you have any questions or concerns.