Saturday, February 2, 2013

Interaction & the online corpus

What I'm going to say goes for a lot of languages, tho what I'm going to reference most often aren't the natural ones, but the planned ones, e.g. Esperanto.

 How do you kickstart a language community? There are several interesting ways that have not yet been fully integrated. Note that all of them, like most sites nowadays, will need a dedicated webmaster to avoid Internet mischief.

 1) image boards: these are very popular for various types of discussions, tho despite their format they're not often used for ostension a la Rosetta Stone. Nay, they're better for bizarre visual jokes, tho what is remarkable is because of that, they very easily innovate very opaque jargon and slang. What's more, there's the capacity to generate and enforce vocabulary shifts front the top down via "wordfilters" and these are a very tried and true method for creating these sorts of changes.

They can be incrementally introduced this way, for example, you post a picture of a cat and say, "This is a jurgol." Someone says, "No, that's a cat," but 'cat' gets changed to "jurgol". I think it would be fun to have an up-front automatic translator for your text so that it does a lot of the work for the user right away,and you add increasing layers so that it's not just a standard calque. Like, maybe have a separate grammar that stipulates OSV word order, implement the word-translation software at a global level, and implement a voting system that would hopefully help police well-formedness.

Active moderation would help too, and I think it would help to be able to retroactively change messages. It should be encouraged to tag posts for content as well, and potentially implement a wiki for the sorts of tropes regarding that content to make it easier to find for people.

2) forums: they would have the same moderation system as above, with karma for users and the ability to thank people for posts as well. Unlike most imageboards content should be archived. Also, posts should be treated as potential 'talk' pages that can be associated to a more traditional sandbox page; that open-to-edits quality is what separates forum posts from more general content pages, and i think that should be something up to a user, whether his post is editable.

I think it would be fantastic to have an ordering of texts, like a separate section for newsposts, user generated fiction and texts, and responses to those; at some level, there would have to be an ontology of posts and certain kinds of aggregators. Certain actions should create their own level of article, e.g. Creating a group for derivative works based on one work of a particular author, or aggregators that decide to group together certain constellations of data for future access and monitoring. What's more it should be possible for these groupings to be private or public, and thus shareable. At a global-level everything would be visible to administrators. Which brings me to...

 3) dictionaries, like urban dictionary or wiktionary. Ideally these would be implementable globally, so that translation back and forth from the target language would be easy. Lernu! does this for Esperanto, but only on certain parts of the site. (It's a godsend for a language learner.) It could be possible to have a user-generated level and a creator-level. I actually think it's not a bad thing for certain things to be private, which is the opposite of much of the Internet, and somewhat inline with some of the aspects of Facebook.

4) Kalusa: there was a conlanging site awhile ago that allowed users to vote on how close to the aesthetic a given text was; people would just vote whether it was right or not. There should be a level for bringing utterances to the attention of the group for checking and parading as exemplars of grammaticality. These could include clever jokes in one post or another, but I don't think they should necessarily be the origin of texts, nor should whole texts be under scrutiny at one time. Nor should grammaticality for conlangs be necessarily a criterion, no more so than in natural languages; some of the best sayings break the rules.

Now one of the chief difference in all of these forms of venues is, how much of a preview do you get? What snippet do you see? With blogs, it tends to be several lines of text before it cuts to the next post. With tweets you see the whole thing, tho images Lways need expanding. Image boards tend to be a mix of long and short posts of great variance, with small thumbnails of pictures beside them, which can be clicked on to open in a new tab (tho it usually can be recognized without expansion.) Wikis show only briefs when you search, just like a typical search via google, but may or may not tell you what a link looks like on the other side of a page. Forums give posts space on a page depending on length, but giving a minimum size depending on the avatar size and user information (Reddit and BBS message boards improve on that by disallowing much user info or avatars.) The ability to ignore users is a benefit to the IMDB forums; being able to focus or block out content depending on a user's whims is an important thing. It should be possible to implement this via tags and tag-filtering that go into a user's preferences. These tags would combine with any particular search tags a user chose on a given search. (Part of this is inspired by the need to encourage creative works a la the massive databases on fanf*ction websites.)

No comments:

Post a Comment