Stanford ASL Instructor Cathy Haas taught this Fall in the Lab’s Language Teaching Studio.  I have wanted to work with Cathy for over ten years and wanted her experience in the Lab to be a positive and productive one.  At about the same time Cathy Haas started teaching in the Lab, I began work on the World Sign Language Project: a project for crowdsourcing a multilingual sign language dictionary based on a core lexicon of 600 Russian Sign Language signs.   The idea was to structure video commenting on the YouTube Channel such that signers around the world could post video blog replies to each gestural entry on the channel. In seeking international participants for the project, I came across a simple and elegantly designed IPhone app for Norwegian Sign Language called Tegnordbok created  by the Moller Resource Centre – Statped in Norway.   Upon downloading the App, I immediately thought that replicating such it with Cathy Haas and her students would be a great use of the Lab’s studio capabilities as well as a simple introduction to the world of iOS development and publishing.

I contacted the developers and requested permission to use their code.  Olle Erikson responded and graciously made the code available under a Creative Commons license.

I installed the iOS SDK, purchased an Apple Developer License, and started hacking my way through the code.   When it looked like this project might actually be feasible, I approached Cathy and her students with the idea  of creating an ASL prototype.  There was enthusiasm and Cathy began planning the content to be captured.  I staged the classroom for shooting video by removing tables, arranging lights, and setting up the capture cart.  Using Cathy’s list of signs,  students then took turns performing and filming each other against a portable blue screen.   The project signers were Mariel Pareyda, Zimberlyn Bolton, Melissa DeMers, Brendond Martin, and Kali Lindsay.  Cathy’s TA’s, Lydia Santos and Kevin Jordan, also volunteered to sign and did some amazing interpreting work.  In addition to signing, student, Melissa DeMers, took digital stills of the video shoot.  Alvin Addo and Melissa DeMers also created artwork to serve as the app’s icon and logo.

Lighting was the most challenging aspect of the project, but we did increase the production quality iteratively as we progressed.  Kenneth Chan and Connie Rylance both offered useful suggestions.

All of the video assets for the project were created in one to two days in Quicktime Player.

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Still art work and graphic elements were a collaborative draft process and took a little longer.   Iphone Apps have an icon and an “about” html page.  The icon Below are icon designs by Alvin Addo and Melissa DeMers.

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Sign Glossing Done in Kaltura in CourseWork

Glossing the signs was done by students using Kaltura in CourseWork.  After the video was shot in the Lab, I realized I had no way to know what the signs meant.  My lack of organization actually led to an interesting workaround; collaborative glossing.   I uploaded the clips to a CourseWork (Powered by Sakai)  Site with Kaltura enabled.  Kim Hayworth and Christine Dougherty assisted with enabling Kaltura in the Language Lab Studio CourseWork Site.  (All of the Lab’s teaching spaces have CourseWork sites.)  I then emailed Kathy’s students with screencast instructions on how to change file names in Kaltura.    Kaltura did my work for me in many ways by allowing students to gloss the signs they had contributed.  Proofing the glosses was also simplified for the instructor.  Kaltura made something hard to do, easy, fast and flexible.

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After capturing the video, adding glosses, and adding graphic elements, it was easy to create a working iPhone app that ran in iOS Simulator using the code from Norway.  Students were excited to see themselves signing in the app in Simulator view.   I have also successfully installed the pilot app on my own phone with the help of Matt Rampone of HighWire Press and Stanford Grad Student Todd Branchflower.  I will be presenting the pilot study at AsiaCALL in Bangkok in February.  We will continue to investigate over Winter Qrt and will be seeking funding sources to advance the project as a task-based service learning project.

After last year’s experience with taking iPad to the field I am finally getting around to reporting back on the 4 week long field research experience with iPad this summer, when we were able to equip our whole field school team (the faculty, a graduate student TA, three undergraduate students and myself) with iPads. Goal for [...]

This August, the Stanford Language Center once again hosted Fulbright Language Teaching Assistants from 26 different countries for a 4 day orientation led by Less Commonly Taught Languages Coordinator, Eva Prionas. For the Web 2.0 portion of the orientation, the Digital Language Lab put the 50 FLTAs to work by hosting a world language, crowd sourcing event in WordPress using the Kaltura Video Plugin. While learning the ins and outs of multimedia blogging, FLTAs participated in the user-created, semantic Web of tagging and crowdsourcing to create the following cultural and instructional resources. This multilingual video blogging activity introduced FLTAs to cloud computing while at the same time serving as team building exercise and show and tell of folklore and tradition.

FLTA Video Blog Activities and Songs

FLTA World Language Music Videos Favorites in YouTube

Tag cloud visualization of FLTA Language Distribution

FLTAs collaboratively authored these resources in less than 2 hours using Web 2.0 technologies supported by Academic Computing Services and ITS.

For my forthcoming book, which includes a chapter on the uses of topic modeling in literary studies, I wrote the following vignette. It is my imperfect attempt at making the mathematical magic of LDA palatable to the average humanist. Imperfect, but hopefully more fun than plate notation. . .

. . . imagine a quaint town, somewhere in New England perhaps. The town is a writer’s retreat, a place they come in the summer months to seek inspiration. Melville is there, Hemingway, Joyce, and Jane Austen just fresh from across the pond. In this mythical town there is spot popular among the inhabitants; it is a little place called the “LDA Buffet.” Sooner or later all the writers go there to find themes for their novels. . .

One afternoon Herman Melville bumps into Jane Austen at the bocce ball court, and they get to talking.

"You know," says Austen, "I have not written a thing in weeks."

"Arrrrgh,” Melville replies, “me neither."

So hand in hand they stroll down Gibbs Lane to the LDA Buffet. Now, down at the LDA Buffet no one gets fat. The buffet only serves light (leit?) motifs, themes, topics, and tropes (seasonal). Melville hands a plate to Austen, grabs another for himself, and they begin walking down the buffet line. Austen is finicky; she spoons a dainty helping of words out of the bucket marked "dancing." A slightly larger spoonful of words, she takes from the "gossip" bucket and then a good ladle’s worth of "courtship."

Melville makes a bee line for the "whaling" trough, and after piling on an Ahab-sized handful of whaling words, he takes a smaller spoonful of "seafaring" and then just a smidgen of "cetological jargon."

The two companions find a table where they sit and begin putting all the words from their plates into sentences, paragraphs, and chapters.

At one point, Austen interrupts this business: "Oh Herman, you must try a bit of this courtship."

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