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Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Cartoon Globalization Awards: Pingu

Parents of small children the world over, students, and those who work from home will probably have heard of Pingu. But you should if you’re interested in language neutral products. 

Pingu is a Swiss animated children’s TV program about a a family of penguins who live in an Igloo at the South Pole (OK, so they’re not too good on geographic habitation patterns). It features a brilliant dialogue that requires no localization at all. For years I thought it was Swedish. But no, it’s Pinguish or Penguinese, described by Wikipedia as:

A honking “penguin language” ... performed (without script) by Carlo Bonomi.

Listen to it and you’ll appreciate how this globally acceptable animal language does away with the need for localization…

I wonder how the localization of “The Simpsons Movie” will fare…

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Happy Birthday Helvetica!

Yep, for those who don’t get out enough (we call them Anoraks here), the BBC news that the Helvetica typeface is 50 comes as the ideal occasion to break out the Mac and Cheese and throw caution to the wind (how about that for mixed cultural metaphors?)...

Looks like there is widespread internationalization support for the font face too. Wikipedia tells us:

Helvetica is among the most widely used sans-serif typefaces internationally. Versions exist for the Roman, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Greek alphabets. Unicode character sets include special characters and accents for Hindi, Urdu, Khmer, and Vietnamese. Variants of character-based writing systems including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have been developed to complement Helvetica.

Naturally, not having copies of the great books by Bill Hall or Ken Lunde easily to hand, I can’t check right now.

Besides, this birthday really is exciting and the most important aspect. I feel it’s crucial for everyone involved in globalization to acknowledge the contribu....(I’m sorry, I seem to have fallen asleep while typing this).

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Text Messaging Technology is Ruining the English Language Say the er, Irish.

There is uproar in the Irish Times newspaper (a journal easily uproared) over the declining standards of English in Ireland. Apparently, the Chief Examiner of Ireland’s Department of Education and Science (An Roinn Oideachais agus Eolaíochta) claimed last month that text messaging somehow represents a significant threat to writing standards in English. 

Naturally, I wondered why he failed to comment on the impact of text messaging on Gaeilge (Irish), or do people only use text messaging in English even in the financially cosetted Gaeltacht?

Anyway. Languages and their presentation evolve, reacting to the needs of society, economics and technology.

Text messaging’s truncated, phonetic, semi-WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) style more of a response to the limitations of the device’s input mechanism and user interface display than the requirements of a “busy” society or illiteracy.  Japanese computer users use an English keyboard with input method editor (IME) software, typing their words phonetically before they are entered correctly in Kanji characters.  QWERTY keyboards exist because that layout originally solved a mechanical problem on early typewriters.  Regardless, if text messaging helps people to communicate with each other, then what is wrong with that?  Text speak is certainly more intelligible or recognizable than the “English” used in Finnegan’s Wake, so there can hardly be an objective standard of what constitutes “traditional conventions in writing” anyway.

The Chief Examiner’s claims are similar to those leveled against Ebonics in the United States of America.  However, Ebonics (or African American Vernacular English) was recognized by the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) in 1997 as being systematic and rule-governed “like all natural speech varieties.” They argued that to characterize Ebonics as “slang”, “mutant”, “lazy”, “defective”, “ungrammatical”, or “broken English” was incorrect and demeaning.  So, why should text messaging be regarded in similarly unflattering terms?

Since the story broke, the Letters Page of the Irish Times has been inundated with opinions on the subject. One correspondent suggested that the solution to improving the quality of text messaging content (in terms of English) was a technical one, i.e., increase the maximum allowed character limit to more than 160 characters. This is nonsense, of course. If you want to go down that route, then I suggest that the minimum number of characters allowed in a text message be 160, thus forcing people to write like Laurence Sterne.

If you’re still having problems understanding “txtspk“, then why not try transl8ing it with this tool?

Saturday, April 07, 2007

The DCU President's Welcome. It Makes Me MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD...

Dublin City University’s President’s Welcome Page Web Globalization Report Card: “Must Try Harder.” And hey, where’s that Polish flag?!

I attended DCU (Dublin City University) for a semester. Have you noticed the “President’s Welcome” page on the college’s web site? Is it just me who really finds something wrong in this day and age with the “Chinese” and “Arab” sections? The wrong renderings, the gif representation of Chinese and Japanese text, those “flags” (with the ALT text of “Chinese” and “Arab League"), the non-Unicode character set, the wrong directional rendering, the missing DIR tag, the LANG tags set to “en”.... ? AAAAAAAGH!

Whatever about the lousy awareness of basic web globalization that this page reveals, at a time when college-level IT education in Ireland finds it hard to attract students (applications down) and when 10% of the Irish population is what is snottily termed “non-national” (as offensive a term as the German Gastarbeiter), it’s clear that educational institutions like DCU need to take a closer look at what kind of message they’re sending and to what audience.

E-mail me and let me know your thoughts!

Monday, May 09, 2005

Unicode texting

If you want to send a non-Latin script text message to a mobile phone, do it via the web. The South African firm SMSWarehouse is tryng to extend market share by offering a Unicode-based texting service on its web site. You log in, select a virtual keyboard for the script of your choice (Arabic, Greek, Russian, Chinese etc), and tap out your message. It displays the other end on a script-compatible mobile phone. This enabling loop via the web is a clever wheeze, but you’d expect most texters would want to operate straight from a mobile phone themselves.

Thursday, March 31, 2005

Program writing on the wall?

For most of the past 4 millennia, writing (inscribing linguistic and related signs on a visible, semi-durable surface) has been an elite skill. Mass literacy only emerged in the 19th century in Europe, and is still on the global agenda of development organizations. You have to learn to write, and that takes time and resources. And ceteris paribus, some writing systems must be cognitively “easier/quicker” to learn than others.

In the past, scholars, monks and writing masters jealously preserved their magical writing skills, especially in cultures such as Sumer and Egypt, where the writing system was highly complex and required a lengthy education. You still find a specialist caste of public writers armed with typewriters lined up outside post offices in countries where illiteracy is common.

Writing computer programs is also an elite skill, and we depend largely on a caste of trained operators who jealously protect their magical ability to translate complex tasks into software for us. Question is: will programming, like writing, evolve into mass computeracy over the next decade/century/millennium? Will we eventually be able to write our own routines and use the inherent power of the machines themselves to transform task concepts expressed in natural language into executable software routines?

For the beginnings of an affirmative answer, check out this story about researchers at MIT who are experimenting with a program called
Metafor that provides a visualization framework for people to program “stories” using English. The idea is to leverage the expressive power of natural language syntax and a semantics as a programming language. Put crudely, you need a translator that transforms natural language to code. Where we might need help from the global developer community in the long term is in making sure that all natural languages, not just English, can be used to program code. There’s no point in attenuating the hold of one “closed shop” over our practices if all we do is replace it with another – this time linguistic – elite.

Thursday, March 24, 2005

a-lettristic

Thanks to Language Hat for this piece of alphabetic fun by Simon Whitechapel. It consists of a set of rotating glyphs as stand-ins for Latin alphabet letters. Where possible, the glyphs distinguish minimal pairs (p vs b, etc) by the direction of rotation for the same shape. Vowels tend to be very simple shapes, consonants more elaborate. Drives you nuts.
The joke of course is that moving letters are illegible, even if you were to simply rotate the members of your normal alphabet. So they abolish the purpose for which they were created. Language aspiring to the condition of cinematics, as it were.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Language: the 3D computer game

For all the sites for language games , constructed languages , artificial languages, Klingon, palindrome collectors, machine translation jokery, slang rangers and the like now active on the web, has anyone tried to apply decent digital design (DDD) to the task of showing how plain old natural language works?

By DDD, I mean deploying animation, graphics, and powerful multimedia interactivity. For the last couple of millennia, discourse about language (i.e. linguistics, translation theory and even language teaching) has made do with static 2D graphics, word lists, tree diagrams to show relationships between items, and various sets of icons to represent spoken pronunciation. We now have the computing power and associated design practices to represent codified knowledge about language so much more powerfully. Surely it’s time to pull language description as a discipline screaming and kicking into a visual culture of swarms, flows and 3D.

There are two obvious angles of approach for a radically dynamic visual representation of language. One would be to show how languages constantly change through time and space – the geography and history of all human tongues as interweaving kinetic patterns. This is the easy approach, since it is in a sense “external” to language as discourse. One simple attempt I have seen is this ‘animated’ site devoted to showing how various character sets, such as the Latin alphabet, evolved over time. But DDD I’m afraid it ain’t.

The other, far more complex line of attack would be to explore the internal structures and relationships of languages, again as visual displays of fields, waves and particles in constant evolution, not as lists of immutable rules. The problem here is that the analysis of language structure underlying such a presentation is theory-driven rather than an objective given. But you could surely generate a nice digital movie that includes all the different approaches to language analysis as they compete for explanatory supremacy.

The real issue about this DDD approach is that it would itself embody a ‘theory’ about language as flow, rather as our old bookish word culture of language led to a theory of structures that were somehow transformed over time. A dynamic, flowing view of language as endless coagulations of meanings emerging into symbolic form and then disappearing again, contrasts starkly with the mechanical plod of a history based on rules.

The linguist Andrew Wedel recently drew attention to this new linguistics agenda:

"I think there is a big shift from the explanation from a single level, advocated by Noam Chomsky, that one grammar algorithm is coded in our genes, to a more layered set of explanations where structure gradually emerges in layers, over time through many cycles of talking and learning,” he said.

“Languages are the ripples in the dunes and the grains of sand are our conversations, generations talking to each other and learning things and slowly creating these larger ripples in time."

And Rob Freeman among other linguists is trying to develop computer models of language built out of rules that emerge from utterances, rather than utterances being pre-defined by rules. Now that we can stream our talk and text as bits and bytes that can instantly transform into any kind of multimedia pattern, we have a source of raw data whose own properties - not those imposed by a tradition of lists and rules - could inspire understanding. Or just entertain us.

Monday, January 24, 2005

Mood gear shift

I remember a language tech product that came out in France in the late 1980s designed to evaluate ‘attitude’ in documents. It used a dictionary to look up word connotations, and by combining connotations into attitude clusters, tried to identify the emotional stance – in fact the negative/ positive quotient - beating at the heart of document collections. It then used color coding of text to point out those chunks of text that exhibited the symptoms. I’m exaggerating a bit, frankly: the product actually started off as an automatic summarizer, but the inventor realized that the attitude of a document, its affective position on entities contained in it, were part of the ‘meaning’ and needed to be included in a good summary. Never heard of it again.

Today there are various technology initiatives underway designed to tap and exploit the emotional content of interactions, and possibly even of texts. At the most basic level, this is embodied in the sort of text mining found in the Reuter’s
Factiva project on ‘corporate reputation’. IBM’s WebFountain has now been dropped as the key technology, but the idea is to identify critical or laudatory remarks in say product reviews, or in analysts’ reports of M&As and so on to track reputations. You would need simple grammars of disdain and praise per language, and some sort of method of weighing up competing shades of attitude in a given search. Wanna know how X’s previous appointments went down in the trade press? Just mine the blogs and the opinion columns. Not perhaps affective computing, but the technology could have a field day with some of those spluttering me-too blogs or star-spangled SMS messages.

Human speech is obviously a much more sensitive indicator of personal emotional states, so it’s nice to see speech recognition technology getting another break here. This report shows how a Scottish firm Affective Media is using speech to identify car drivers’ feelings of road rage or drowsiness so that in-car solutions can be used to reduce them.

Affective Media chief executive Christian Jones said prototypes were being fitted to trial vehicles and claimed the system could be a life-saver. “Studies show unhappy or angry drivers are more prone to accidents than drivers who are relaxed,” he said. “Our technology will work with any voice recognition software. In the future, more cars will have voice-activated controls. This technology will sample the voice to tell if a person is angry or frustrated and will then act accordingly.

Alun Parry, spokesman for Toyota, said the company planned to test emotion-detecting technology in its experimental “Pod” cars. “We want a car to respond to the emotion of the driver and, as well as the voice technology, the Pod will monitor the driver’s pulse and could act to slow the car if it senses that the driver is being erratic or going too fast,” he said.

Posted by Andrew on 01/24 at 10:56 AM

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Thursday, December 23, 2004

Can graffiti and public scribbling go digital?

In the Christmas edition of The Economist , there’s an interesting article on graffiti which concludes that the heyday of graffiti is over (partly replaced in the city by the pervasive anti-language of tagging) since the Internet offers a global outlet for ex-wall writers with a yen for anonymous antisocial messaging.

This is true in the sense that there are websites that offer megaphones to ranters of all stripes. But genuine e-graffiti would actually consist of messages surreptitiously splashed on someone else’s valuable real estate, not as message files to a chat room lodged on a receptive website. In other words, graffiti would have to be messages literally scribbled onto much-visited home pages (like popups?), not simply virus-carrying messages, email scams or hacker raids on databases. As far as I know, discursive popup graffiti have not been much experimented with. Presumably the security apparatus gradually being bolted into place on the Internet will soon make such irreverent e-scribbling technically impossible. You might argue that some blogs play a graffiti-esque role in the web’s community, but most blogs are still far too wordily hypertextual to rank as taut mural haikus.

The real digital problem with graffiti, though, is that part of their demotic charm comes from the iconicity of their interface - their mix of phrase and symbol (think Kilroy in Anglo-American culture) crudely inscribed by hand on public surfaces. Take away this physical “I was here” interface, and graffiti lose their punch. Until we get proper scribbleware (beyond the tyranny of the file, as Ted Nelson once put it) which allows us to write and draw at will on any sort of e-surface and have our scribbles saved and searched without having to name them, graffiti will have to stay on the world’s bricks and mortar.

What I’ve called here iconicity brings us to a further handicap for people who want to communicate by drawing. Without laboriously photographing your cartoons or sketches first and then saving them as files and then inserting the file in a blog or a website, it is very hard to share a ‘draw-pic’ (as opposed to a ‘photo-pic’) with others. Think how few bloggers or chat room messages, for example, make use of drawings to convey feelings or experiences. It’s just too complicated. For all the graphic ingenuity of web design, and the plethora of finicky graphics technologies devoted to geewizz image-making, we still don’t have powerful yet intuitive web tools for drawing a quick pic and scribbling a few words around it to make a point. So much for new media.

What about smilicons, you might say, as a replacement for personal drawing tools? I find them too standardized to express anything beyond a sort of metalingual smirk. So dear Santa, what I want for Christmas is a digital pencil box, not that digital camera.

Posted by Andrew on 12/23 at 10:05 AM

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Thursday, November 18, 2004

Writing and reading content c. 2050

Most authoring done on personal computers today is just automated paper document creation or automated letters for an automated post office. Worse, the advent of WWW browsers for the Internet disastrously turned users into simple consumers, because the browsers do not permit any kind of balanced authoring for Internet content. That this was allowed to happen is almost beyond belief and has been a terrible setback.Alan Kay

What follows is a longish riff on imaginary authoring systems. Here’s the agenda: Could the steady shift from static text to dynamic visualization now emerging in computer programming, search results in business intelligence applications, product design and business process representations eventually impact the document authoring process? Should we start envisioning the ancient labor of writing as something that can be automated through diagrams and pictures? And could we later make it available to readers as pictures or movie narratives rather than text?

Consider this: instead of writing a document section by linear section, how about designing a document as a ragbag of ideas, examples, references, and stories, that can be automatically shaped and expressed by software, drawing on content databases and programming routines?
You could select from a menu of objectives, target audiences, etc (we’ll need a very powerful taxonomy of document types, functions, approaches, dimensions etc etc) and the machinery will do all the work. Stylometric tracking of your existing authored documents could produce a style profile that would be plugged in to personalize the output. But the ultimate purpose of authoring systems would be to craft content for readers, not ‘express’ the writer. Le style, c’est l’homme-qui-lit même….

This might suggest ‘Raymond Chandler does plasma physics’ or a legal tome à la Salman Rushdie, but the idea would be to explore how far personalization can be taken beyond its current rather banal horizon. Readerly authoring like this would truly herald that death-of-the-author meme, once identified by Barthes and explained by Foucault!!

Next logical step: instead of just reading a document in the usual old way, why not automatically translate it into a series of visual representations (a sort of Flash implementation) that do such things such as highlight arguments, capture inconsistencies, pick out story-lines, unveil subtexts, identify allusions, summarize, offer counter-evidence or arguments, and so on?

Rather as we entertain the notion of textual content as a sort of virtual microworld populated with concepts and arguments and stories that tug at our hearts and minds, let’s get the machines to automatically adapt this content into a physical movie, slide show, or flow chart, or indeed invent some new medium for the dynamic expression or represntation of ideational content, that simply does the job even better than scanning print with a pencil in one’s hand.

It is not hard to recognize the kind of documents that would lend themselves to this type of translation, starting with instructional texts. The history of culture is already packed with examples of ‘media translations’ from stories and jokes to plays to films to operas to comic books to multimedia extravaganzas to radio dramas to bowdlerized editions or signed versions. Think in English of the destiny of a piece of print content such as “Alice in Wonderland”.  But in a print culture, documents were scarce and were therefore designed to last. In a digital world, this is no longer necessary. We can now leverage the extraordinary capacity for media metamorphosis into a natural value of content holders. This rich personalization (way beyond mainstream genre or media metamorphosis) of textual content would therefore be one vital area to explore.

In other words, let’s start thinking of future authors’ words as (among other things) instructions to visualize (not imagine) content externally in the real world (i.e. not in our heads). And at the same time, let’s try and think of existing authored products as instructions to a machine to make visual or multimedia displays of both conceptual and intellectual content (“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man is in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”), as well as more obvious descriptions or activities identified in texts by words (“The Marquis went out at five o’clock” or “the planet Mars”).

These automated ‘authoring’ and ‘reading’ (for lack of better terms) models would in the end converge into a new vision of content. Worthwhile documents get generated automatically from a resource by specifying a purpose (e.g. write a report summarizing activities in the fishing boat construction market in Norway between 200X and 200Y) and an audience (French bankers) and the software does the rest. The report’s “text” (as we would call it still today) could then be fed into a display model, offering a number of visualizations, including good old back print on white paper, but extending in various ways into dynamic representations that draw on real time content updates, group contributions etc etc.

None of these manifestations of a document needs a long shelf life. Indeed, ‘documents’ would become but fleeting coagulations of content in the constant flow of data, rather like the motile thoughts that stream through our consciousness. Actionable content alone would congeal into sets of instructions to act (strategies, tactics, plans, etc.).

To convince you that all this is not completely off the wall, here a few leads on concepts at work in the current content visualization space (see my earlier post on this topic). You are probably familiar with visualization desktop applications that can take a boring table of numerical data and turns it into colorful pie-charts and other graphics. Well, this track of presenting data as diagrams and other visual models has been pursued much further by firms such as Anacubis that helps analysts ‘discover’ knowledge by presenting reams of content as visually engaging diagrams that highlight links and associations that get lost in the gray blur of print. Another innovator here is i2’s investigative analysis software, that will automatically translate complex time line data into visual maps that help analysts compare the causes and effects of incidents, for example. In a similar way, some search engines will now offer pictures of results, representing the usual list of URLs as trees with branches, or star-shaped clusters of links.

This type of visualization is fine for inspecting an information source domain, but it is hard to know whether you could use it to picture the meaning (or implications) of a single document. Most of us still prefer the good old Table of Contents or the index to get a intellectual handle on texts. For example, anyone who has translated a large factual book will tell you that the best place to start is the index: translate the indexed terms and you have a powerful cognitive picture of what’s in the body of the book, plus a handy terminology base. My question here would be: are there any ways in which technology can help us ‘learn’ what is in a book (maybe I mean ‘read’ it) by having the book content engineered into a graphical and above all dynamic mode?

Another visualization track that gets us a bit closer to our initial visual authoring idea covers new products coming on the market designed to help word-centric people put their ideas into visual form to drive a product design process.
N8 Systems lets business analysts describe the steps of a business process in words and then automatically converts the language into diagrams.

The N8 text modeling tool then transforms the written requirements into use case and activity diagrams. The analyst is able to see immediately where the inconsistencies in the definition of a process or workflow occur, and can then make rapid iterations to achieve and articulate the desired outcome. He can then share the process diagrams with multiple constituents in the business unit to check that the definitions are accurate, and can quickly modify them as needed.
Once satisfied with the results, the business analyst provides the diagrams to the system architect, consultant, or other solution provider to help jump-start the requirements process. Communication is enhanced as both parties share precise, accurate diagrams of the written requirements.

Stottler Henke’s SimBionic is a visual authoring tool and runtime engine for creating complex behaviors found in games and instructional media.

It uses a graphical interface to specify behaviors, so that non-programmer ‘subject matter experts’ can create them. This reduces the risk of simulation errors related to miscommunication of content between an expert and a programmer.3D software

Perhaps the best example of the power of visualization to boost authoring is found in the emerging field of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), where the French company Dassault Systems (DS) is leading the pack with the concept of 3D for All .

I happen know a little about DS because I once did some writing work for them. To simplify drastically, PLM software uses 3D functionality to model, design, engineer and test not just a potentially manufacturable product such as a mobile phone or an airplane door, but every other aspect of that product’s lifetime, from designing the appropriate manufacturing process to the kind of factory you’d need to house it in. In other words, rather as I was imagining for texts, products become huge databases of design information that can then intercat with any number of other digital tools. The key advantage in PLM is that you can work together as a team to deszign a new product and then test it virtually in 3D, instead of wasting good money on building a whole airplane in the real world to see what happens in the wind tunnel.

But what interested me most at DS was the disruptive fact that the lowly process I was involved in used none of this superb 3D software to enhance the process of producing a complex document. As in most text authoring situations, I would guess, it was all faxes, text files and PDFs of the graphic design and endless rewritings and no real integration between designer, graphics/colors/layout, and the words. Although I notice that DS has just signed a wide-ranging alliance with Microsoft to extend PLM software to small enterprise users of the Microsoft .NET platform, I doubt that document production will enter the PLM engineering mindset any time yet. I would, however, bet that games, advanced toys, and possibly business process design will be the first future targets for 3D - and other design - software.

Posted by Andrew on 11/18 at 09:27 AM

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Friday, October 22, 2004

It's all just metadata

A think piece on why all data is becoming metadata, from DavidWeinburger

There used to be a difference between data and metadata. Data was the suitcase and metadata was the name tag on it. Data was the folder and metadata was its label. Data was the contents of the book and metadata was the Dewey Decimal number on its spine. But, in the Third Age of Order (see the previous issue), everything is becoming metadata.

For example, imagine you’re at a large corporation doing a Third Order treatment of its digital library of research articles. Instead of (or, in addition to) designing a large, complex, hierarchical taxonomy, you focus on adding enough metadata to each article so that people will be able to sort and classify them any which way they want. If someone wants to find all the articles that talk about hydrocarbons written in Italian in 1965 and that have more than 30 footnotes, they’ll be able to. If someone wants to make a browsable hierarchy based not on topic but on gender or on the number of co-authors, they’ll be able to. You build enriched objects first so your users can forever after taxonomize the way they want to, instead of the way you think they’ll want to.

Now take a closer look at these information objects. They look like contents tagged with lots of metadata, but in fact they’re all metadata. If I’m looking for an article about hydrocarbons written by Barbara Rodriguez, then the article’s topic ("hydrocarbons") and author’s name ("Rodriguez, Barbara") are metadata, and the content is the data. But, I could just as well be trying to remember the name of the author who wrote an article that included the phrase “Hydrocarbons are the burros of the the cosmos” sometime in the 1960s, in which case the content and date are metadata and the author’s name is the data. What’s data and what’s metadata depends on the person doing the asking.

So, in the Third Age of Order, all data is metadata. Contents are labels. Data is all surface and no insides. It’s all handles and no suitcase. It’s a folder whose content is just another label. It’s all sticker and no bumper.

Why does this matter? It changes the primary job of information architects. It makes stores of information more useful to users. It enables research that otherwise would be difficult, thus making our culture smarter overall. But, most interestingly (at least to me), this does the ol’ Einsteinian reverse flip to Aristotle. Aristotle assumed that of the 10 categories by which one could understand a thing, one must be primary: Where that thing fits into the tree of knowledge. So, you could say that Alcibiades is made of flesh or lived in Greece, but if you really want to understand him, you have to say that he is an animal of a particular kind. But, now that everything is metadata, no particular way of understanding something is any more inherently valuable than any other; it all depends on what you’re trying to do. The old framework of knowledge — and authority — are getting a pretty good shake.

Posted by Andrew on 10/22 at 08:14 AM

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