Linked Data and SIL a two way street
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Raimond talks about pulling data in from the semantic web. What if SIL were to do the same?
http://raimond.me.uk/pubs/
Author Archives: Hugh Paterson III
Summer bikes
This summer I had the opportunity to buy and sell a few bikes. Every summer Grand Forks has a bike auction. I purchased a few bikes. Rode one for the summer and had another one stolen. I sold a few during the last week.
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Bike Sold.
Combination of Tips
Some days I am more clever than others. Today, I was working on digitizing about 50 older (30 years old) cassettes for a linguist. To organize the data I have need of creating a folder for each tape. Each folder needs to be sequentially numbered. It is a lot of tedious work - not something I enjoy.
So I looked up a few things in terminal to see if I could speed up the process. I needed to create a few folders so I looked up on hints MacWorld:
So I looked at the mkdir command, which creates new folders or directories. It uses the following syntax: mkdir folder1 folder2 folder3
Now I needed a list of the folders I needed... something like 50.
So I created a formula in a google spreadsheet using the Concatenate command. I was able in one column to add the Alpha characters I needed and in the next column I was able to add the sequential numerics I needed.
Now I had a list of 50 names of my folders, but I still needed to remove the return characters which separated them from each other to allow the mkdir command to work. So I opened up TextEdit and did a search for return tabs in the document and deleted them.
Now I could just paste the 50 folder names in terminal and hit enter and it created 50 folders... But I wonder if there was a way to add sequential numbers to a base folder-name in terminal without using google spreadsheets...
Three years late this answer would have been what I was looking for: https://askubuntu.com/posts/731730/revisions from: https://askubuntu.com/questions/731721/is-there-a-way-to-create-multiple-directories-at-once-with-mkdir
LOCKS and archives
How do you ensure permissions? If other archives post the same content online. It’s not just about distributing content but also about distributing content and access permissions.
With the rise in citation of content: How do you show researchers that two files are the same? Where do you point citations?
Hybrid Corn in Mexico
For one of our projects in the Literacy Mega-Course we had to do a culture calendar. I have been looking at México and working with a group planning a literacy program for an indigenous community there. Considering the cultural elements of México corn is a big one. So I started to poke around the internet and look at what the big issues are for México and corn. I don't know why I have never done this before, but to my shock, one of the big things in English about corn in México is the use of GMO corn. I am just going to post a few links because there is no need to add to the plethora of blogs discussing the issue. Continue reading
Do I Follow Other’s Ideas as Dogma
Steve Jobs Quote
I think there is some advice worth thinking about here. I think that Steve, got the cart before the horse so to say with respect to Psalm 37:3 and Proverbs 3:5-6. But in terms of how we as humans have a tendency to look to our social network and let that identify who we are... there is something to be heard from the man who shaped society with his innovation and leadership in design and User Experience.
Client-Side Content Restrictions for Archives and Content Providers
Two times since the launch of the new SIL.org website colleagues of mine have contacted me about the new requirement on SIL.org to log-in before downloading content from the SIL Language and Culture Archive. Both know that I relate to the website implementation team. I feel as if they expect me to be able to speak into this situation (as if I even have this sort of power) - I only work with the team in a loose affiliation (from a different sub-group within SIL), I don't make design decisions, social impact decisions, or negotiate the politics of content distribution.
However, I think there are some real concerns by web-users users about being required to log-in prior to downloading, and some real considerations which are not being realized by web-users.
I want to reply to these concernes.
Software Needs for a Language Documentation Project
In this post I take a look at some of the software needs of a language documentation team. One of my ongoing concerns of linguistic software development teams (like SIL International's Palaso or LSDev, or MPI's archive software group, or a host of other niche software products adapted from main stream open-source projects) is the approach they take in communicating how to use the various elements of their software together to create useful workflows for linguists participating in field research on minority languages. Many of these software development teams do not take the approach that potential software users coming to their website want to be oriented to how these software solutions work together to solve specific problems in the language documentation problem space. Now, it is true that every language documentation program is different and will have different goals and outputs, but many of these goals are the same across projects. New users to software want to know top level organizational assumptions made by software developers. That is, they want to evaluate how software will work in a given scenario (problem space) and to understand and make informed decisions based on the eco-system that the software will lead them into. This is not too unlike users asking which is better Android or iPhone, and then deciding what works not just with a given device but where they will buy their music, their digital books, and how they will get those digital assets to a new device, when the phone they are about to buy no-longer serves them. These digital consequences are not in the mind of every consumer... but they are nonetheless real consequences.
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To Protect and Serve…
In the U.S. we have a long tradition of citizenry, police, and military. For many years the citizenry has had distinct semantic categories for these social functions. However, I think there is evidence that at some levels these distinctions are merging. While not all citizens agree that the merger is useful, it is nevertheless happening at a political and managerial level. Terms like Law Enforcement extend beyond the traditional roles of police and bring the police into a larger strategically orchestrated social movement. In addition to this some of the traditional imagery surrounding police has changed. While it does raise many questions about the order and structure of society in the U.S. one question which seems pertinent to ask is: Who is protected and Who is served?
More Traditional Police imagery.
More modern police imagery.
More modern police imagery.
Imagery is only one way to assess the conflation of semantic concepts. Another way to look at it would be to consider concepts and terminology of detainees and prisoners as those concepts are practiced by Law Enforcement operators. A look at the U.S. Army's Internment and Resettlement manual's terminology found in FM 3-39.40 available at http://armypubs.army.mil/doctrine/19_Series_Collection_1.html or locally [PDF]
Audio Dominant Texts and Text Dominant Audio
As linguistics and language documentation interface with digital humanities there has been a lot of effort to time-align texts and audio/video materials. At one level this is rather trivial to do and has the backing of comercial media processes like subtitles in movies. However, at another level this task is often done in XML for every project (digital corpus curation) slightly differently. At the macro-scale the argument is that if the annotation of the audio is in XML and someone wants to do something else with it, then they can just convert the XML to whatever schema they desire. This is true.
However, one antidotal point that I have not heard in discussion of time aligned texts is specifications for Audio Dominant Text vs. Text Dominant Audio. This may not initially seem very important, so let me explain what I mean.
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