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. It doesn't matter what the names of those .its and .wav files are.
6. Once you have data organized in this way, you can make zip files at the participant level and share those zips with CMU via WeTransfer, using the following steps.
   • Connect to https://talkbank.wetransfer.com.
   • You will have to check a box saying that you agree to their terms and conditions. You will only have to do this once.
   • In the box on the left, enter macw@cmu.edu for "email to".
   • Enter your email as "your email" and add a message, if you wish.
   • Then click the "Plus" icon in the upper right.
   • Drag the files you wish to transfer into the "Add Your Files" window or click the plus to locate them.
   • Click the "Transfer" button and watch the transfer going through. You can do other work on your computer during this time.
   • The WeTransferPlus facility then sends us an email advising us when the transfer is complete.
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.