We’re just shy of our first “alpha” (which we’re going to call a “preview”). This means we have to catch up on doing some of those non-coding things like documentation, release notes, etc. Here’s a pretty extensive, though not yet complete list of what we’ve done and have left to do for version 1.
Though it was stranded by our university closing down for Thai New Year, Alan delivered our OLPC test machine yesterday. It may look like a toy, but it feels very substantial. Heavy, even.
I think Kinesis keyboards like mine shown here should be standard issue with the OLPCs.
It’s been awhile since we’ve posted but that does not mean we haven’t been active. I’ve added a new task to collect words by semantic domains. There is substantial evidence that we organize words in our minds in a network of relationships. Words tend to cluster in groups that we call semantic domains. People can rapidly jump from word to word along the mental pathways within a semantic domain. If you ask someone to think of words that describe the surface of water, they can quickly give you a number of words such as “turbulent”, “rippled”, “calm”, “still”, “rough”, “choppy”, and “glassy”.
Thinking of words by semantic domains is used to jump start the dictionary creation process. For each domain, a set of elicitation questions prompt users to think of the words that belong to that domain. For instance, the domain “Fish with net” contains the questions,
When the user enters a word, it is inserted into the dictionary and automatically classified by that domain.
The semantic domain task can use any template of semantic domains and questions but WeSay ships with the semantic domain template from Ron Moe’s Dictionary Development Process.