[kidsgames] Gutenberg Dreams and language software

["Bruce G. Robertson" <brobertson@mta.ca>]

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.

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 Then there's a ton of historical document: Gettysburg Address

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

3. Children's stuff:

a. Adventures of Pinnochhio, Carlo Collodi/Lorenzini (build on
Disney, I suppose). 

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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? "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.

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...

Yrs,
-- 
Bruce G. Robertson, Dept. of Classics, Mount Allison University
note my new email address: brobertson@mta.ca
http://www.java.utoronto.ca/~brucerob
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