a local research workbench for people studying code-switching in South African multilingual interview data
# Imbizo-CS Workbench
Imbizo-CS Workbench is a local research workbench for people studying
code-switching in South African multilingual interview data.
It is designed for humanities and social-science researchers who need to keep
their material on their own computer. The app works with local project folders:
your transcripts, annotations, logs, dictionaries, and exports stay inside the
folder you choose.
Imbizo-CS Workbench is not a cloud assistant. It does not require an account,
subscription, API key, telemetry, or internet connection for core work.
## What You Can Do In The MVP
- Create and open a local research project.
- Import TXT, CSV, TSV, JSON, XLSX, ODS, ELAN EAF, Praat TextGrid, audio, and
video files.
- Continue annotating imported transcript data at token level.
- Keep original transcript text separate from optional normalized text.
- Add or override language labels manually.
- Record Matrix Language, Embedded Language, switch type, linguistic status,
trigger text, confidence, tags, memos, and morpheme splits.
- Run local language-identification suggestions that remain editable.
- Compute language proportions, switch count, switch density, dominant language,
M-index, I-index, burstiness, trigger tables, and KWIC concordance.
- Export CSV, XLSX, JSON, EAF, TextGrid, HTML, PDF, and quotation extracts.
### Optional Coarse Language Group Gate
Local LID suggestions can now be run with an optional coarse language group
gate. This is not a final language classifier. It groups candidate evidence
into broad South African language families such as Germanic, Nguni, and
Sotho-Tswana, then blocks only risky auto-annotation when the evidence is too
weak or when closely related languages are hard to separate. Suggestions are
still saved in `lid_suggestions.evidence_json` for audit and review.
The gate is off by default, never overwrites manual or imported annotations,
and does not change Matrix Language, Embedded Language, switch-type, tags,
memos, morpheme s …