WeSay News

If you aren’t yet using the new collaboration features of WeSay, you may have multiple versions of your dictionary out there.  Here are a few notes on ways to get them together.

The simplest case is where the users have been working on completely different sets of words, with no overlap. That is, they each started with completely empty dictionaries, which have never once been merged together.  In this specific case, you can merge them by hand.  Do that by opening each .lift file and copying all the <entry>…</entry> chunks of one file in next to the <entry>…</entry> chunks of the other file.    Open in WeSay to make sure you didn’t mess the lift file up.

In the more general case, you will want to merge them together using FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx).  To do that, follow these steps:

1) Create a new project using FLEx.

2) Import each .lift file into the project, one at a time, until you have a nice combined dictionary.

If getting/installing/using FLEx seems like to much, you can always just ask for someone to do this for you.  Write to the WeSay email list and ask someone to do the merge for you.

WeSay has always had Tasks which would show you just the words that needed some more information in a particular field.  However, the selection of which entries to show was pretty blunt:  if the field had an empty slot in any of its multiple writing systems, the task would show that entry.  This meant that you couldn’t easily set up WeSay for a user who, for example, just wanted to add vernacular definitions where English ones had already been entered. 

In another case, we might want to set a user up to add voice recordings of example sentences. But the task should only show example sentences where someone had previously entered in the example text.

The latest development release (0.5 build 2000) addresses this.  When you first create a project, tasks are configured to have the same behavior as before: an entry will be chosen if *any* of the writing systems assigned to that field are empty.

You can now limit the task to filling in the vernacular (gaw, in this example):

In addition, we can limit the task to only those entries where some other writing system has already been filled in:

Thanks, Mark, for taking the time to submit this request.  We would appreciate any feedback you can give us on this feature.  Does it work well for you?

The obvious next step would be to add a way make duplicates of some tasks, so that you could have both an “Add Examples” and an “Add Example Recordings” task.  This is now possible by editing the .wesayconfig file in a text editor.  If you want to know how, set me an message (hattonjohn at gmail).  That will tell me how much demand there is for it, and if there’s enough, we’ll make it easier.

Illustrations always cheer up an otherwise drab dictionary.  Until now, you had to put in a lot of work to find or create illustrations, get the rights to them,  and hook them into your dictionary.  With the latest release of our 0.5 line (build 1917), adding illustrations is a lot more fun.

First, let’s have a visual tour of the new feature.  Then I’ll explain about “Art Of Reading”.

To add an illustration, you just go to the Picture field and click “Search Gallery…”:

(Notice that the old “Choose Image File…” is still there.  Eventually, we should make that button hidden by default, as it violates our desire to not send the WeSay user into the confusing depths of the file system.)

WeSay looks in the English meaning and uses it to search the gallery for matching illustrations:

If that doesn’t show you the pictures you’re looking for, you can change the search terms and try again.  Once you find the one you want, you double click on it.  This closes the dialog and inserts the illustration:

Art of Reading 2.0 is a CD put out by SIL; ask around, someone near you may already have it.  If not, you can order it here.  From that page:

International Illustrations is the second artwork CD-ROM produced by the International Literacy Department of SIL International. This expanded, enhanced collection is the follow-up to Art of Reading 1.0 and contains over 11,000 indexed images collected from SIL and national artists around the world. Searchable by keywords.

Black and white line drawings (in compressed TIF format for Windows and Mac) are suitable for use in a wide variety of literacy materials, newsletters, bulletin board displays, and other cultural awareness materials.

Images come from Brazil, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Colombia, D.R. of Congo, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Senegal, Sudan, Thailand, USA

I’m told there’s a version 3 in the works, which will be a DVD with even more illustrations and an Indonesian index.

Update Sept 2009: The Version 3 DVD is now available. Note, though the product is advertised for Windows and Mac, it will work on Linux too, if you’re using WeSay.

Update Nov 2009: I’m told this new AOR version doesn’t actually add any new photos… it’s mostly about a new version of the browsing software (which WeSay doesn’t use) and the addition of an Indonesian index (which WeSay already has).  If that’s true, there’s no reason to upgrade if you’re only using AOR for WeSay.

If/when anyone produces indices for French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc., tell us and we’ll add them to WeSay, too (I suspect you could use a computer translator to generate something useful, quickly). Notice, some of the description of how the package works is irrelevant.  The included software is too unwieldy for a WeSay audience.  WeSay bypasses that software, keeping the process as simple as you see above.

Get the latest WeSay here.  As always, we rely on your feedback here on the blog, on the Google Group, or (if you have a problem) via email: issues at wesay.org.

Thanks to René van den Berg for inspiring this new feature.

Technical Details

• [Updated Nov 2009] To get started, you need to copy the images it to your hard drive.  On Windows, WeSay will look for it at “C:\Art of Reading”.  You don’t need anything but the “images” folder, which would be at “C:\Art Of Reading\Images”.  On Linux, you have 3 choices:
  /usr/share/wesay/ArtOfReading/images
  /usr/share/ArtOfReading/images
  /var/share/ArtOfReading/images
• I do not know if WeSay’s index of this package works with Art Of Reading 1.0.  It works with 2.0, and should work fine for with 3.0, though I don’t have a copy of that yet to test.
• If you have a different image library which you think would be widely used, let us know. It would be great to have one which could be downloaded for free.
• This feature is the latest (and last) major addition to WeSay 0.5, our “development” release.  Projects created or edited in 0.5 cannot be opened with WeSay 0.4, our “stable” release as of the date of this posting.