Re: [kidsgames] Gutenberg Dreams and language software

[Jeffery Douglas Waddell <jeff@smluc.org>]

Hello Bruce,

On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, Bruce G. Robertson wrote:

> 
> Gang:
> Some texts on project Gutenberg that could be of use to our project (not just
> in multimedia readers). The following is written as stream-of-thought:
> 
> 1. The 1997 CIA world
> factbook: http://sailor.gutenberg.org/gutenberg/by-title/xx13.html
> 
> In playing around with making a dict server in perl, I crunched through this
> text to extract data about countries and so on. It is in pretty regular, hence
> machine-readable, form. (My daughter would dig a find-the-country app.)
> 
> Could be scaled up to include population data, etc.
> 

This should be an excellent text to draw from.

> 2. Then there's a ton of historical document: Gettysburg Address
> 

Hmm.

> 2.5 Don't forget the midi music here: Beethoven, so on.
> 

Yeah!

> 3. Children's stuff:
> 
> a. Adventures of Pinnochhio, Carlo Collodi/Lorenzini (build on
> Disney, I suppose). 
> 

Good.

> What about a simple text/picture/compressed audio engine
> so that we could make readings of these classics? Something pretty simple
> which simulates a great reading of a great book? Then people with lesser
> technical skills could help by doing the readings...
> 

Ok, this sounds promising.  I know I've read (on tape) books to my son and
daughter so they could play them when I'm not there.  If pictures/music
could be added and displayed to them on the computer they would love it
I'm sure.

> Take a look at ftp://sailor.gutenberg.org/pub/gutenberg/etext96/pnoco10.txt
> and imagine the experience. Maybe with some sound effects and music to go
> with.
> 

hmmm.  I know that you can use xanim to display sound + pictures fairly
easily.  If there's an easy way to include the text of the book then, we
could have something going very quickly....

> A year ago my wife sent a tape to her god-daughter of herself reading a story
> that they both like. We are told that Chloe *loves* that tape and listens to
> it several times a week. If one could add one's own readings to a
> pre-fabricated picture/text environment, then kids could have grandpa and
> grandma reading them these fantastic stories! Not exactly a game; not exactly
> education, but I think it fits the bill.
> 

Yes I think it's good.  And yes it DEFINATELY IS education.  The children
are learning culture and language...and in such a wonderful way ;)

> This idea has a virtue that we've been seeking, too: it scales from the very
> young (2 yrs?) to the older, at least the engine does. A 12 yr. old might
> really get into the Count of Monte Cristo 
> <ftp://sailor.gutenberg.org/pub/gutenberg/etext98/crsto10.txt>, an 18
> yr. old, Herodotus
> and a 40 yr. old, Plato's Republic, book 10.
> <http://sailor.gutenberg.org/gutenberg/by-title/xx1371.html>
> 
> (ok, by this time I'm selling Greek lit a
> little too hard, and going beyond the mandate, but you see what I mean.)

A little heavy on the Greek Lit. but a good idea none the less...

> For the upper years, image could be not just fun, but instructive, like those
> comic-book Beginner's Guide to Hagel thingies.
> 

Not familiar with it.

> What I really like about this idea is that it would use technology to bring
> the classics to life.  They are, after all, our Open Source literature :-)
> 
> For the young, e.g. Hans Christian Anderson.
> 
> What we would need is a good multi-media development environment, and others
> have been looking into that. If we, or some of us, went down the road I
> describe, I think it would be really great if we could be sure it was
> cross-platform, but who knows. The free code for mp3 decoding is floating
> around on linux to grab. It might be a nightmare for the Mac.
> 

mp3 is free to decode, however it's patented and although there IS a
gpl'ed encoder, it is technically illegal.  This pushes me toward .au,
.midi, etc.

However for the sake of content increasing, I suppose it would be of no
issue for each content provider to donate the reading, singing, etc. in
whatever form they can get into their computer (.voc, .wav, .au, .mp3,
whatever) and then it will be encumbent on us to get that into a form that
is universally acceptable.  Do you have the capability desire to read some
of those texts you are talking about to get us on the way.  I'm willing
myself, but it will be a while before I can create the TIME to do it ;)

> About Hypercard. Apple's policy on this is a bit of a mess. I think they've
> given up on it because the language is so very loose and poorly specified. I
> sell software built (in the early 90's) with this (for students of Latin:
> <http://www.interlog.com/~aji/Latinitas>). At the time it was the only
> scripting show on earth, but I wouldn't recommend it as a development
> language/environment now.
> 
> Making Latin software that intelligently inflects words has forced me to think
> about databases for these things. Taking the wordnet stuff and
> marking it up with and XML dtd is a great idea, but we'd need to see how far
> we want to go - do we indicate a word's grammatical function, do we add info
> so that we can inflect it? 

inflection would be awesome, however I don't think it is initially
required.

>"I run, you have run...." Lots of work! There may be
> some pretty spiffy morphological parser/generators for English that will do the
> trick without us needing to make generators.  The Summer Language Institute
> tends to do these things: http://www.sli.org, I think.
> 

hmmm,  we need that language arts coordinator for the project, are you
willing to head up this effort to explore the language aspects....

> So many ideas, so little time....
> 
> Oh, by the way, I called Jeff Rob in my last letter. Rob is my choir director;
> tells you something about how the mind works...
> 

I don't mind being the choir director, it's the choir members that do all
the singing, and I get the best seat in the house.  Now, if we could just
sing the same song at the same time..... ;)

Jeff Waddell
jeff@smluc.org



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