The aim of this tutorial is to provide a systematic and reproducible way of coding ape gestures and combination of signals with ELAN. ¹ We describe and detail our GApS (Great Apes Signals) coding scheme, provide our ELAN coding template, some coding examples, signal descriptions, and Excel outputs.

Our coding scheme is not intended to be definitive, but to provide a good starting point for coding gestures and signal combinations, to promote data sharing and reproducibility, and facilitate inter-coder reliability.

Its aim is to fill in the “gaps” between species, studies and methodologies in the field of animal signalling research.

The coding scheme can easily be adapted to any research question and study species.

We also provide a new innovative open-source software, called 'elan_finder', developed specifically for exploring annotated files in ELAN. It allows you to find specific occurrences and annotations in your entire ELAN database, to preview them and extract them in a spreadsheet format.

1. ELAN (Version 6.4) [Computer software]. (2022). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Language Archive. Retrieved from https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan. ↩

If you use our coding scheme and/or its related open-access material please cite:

Genty, E., & Fuchs, M. (2023). GApS: A Coding Scheme for Great Apes Signals in ELAN (Version v1.0.2). https://greatapesgestures.github.io/