In case anyone’s interested in seeing them, here are pics of a few of the guys I’ve set up on WeSay.
pics of some of the guys
Kent's Blog
A bit about our work in linguistic analysis and encouraging language development
Great to see some of your people. I’m pioneering using WeSay in Nigeria (it would appear) and would really love if someone a little more experienced could make some short video clips of people actually using WeSay in real life, for both word gathering and word description. Would you be able to do that? Do you know someone else who has done that?
If you’re talking about videoing the work, it isn’t that exciting to look at –a bunch of people in a room huddled around computers. Are you thinking of how to use the program itself? I thought that was pretty straightforward. One thing that I think isn’t we’ll documented, is how to use WeSay (with or without FLEx) for orthography development, which is my primary interest. I’m developing my work flow now, and I’ll try to blog about what I come up with.
Well maybe it’s not all that exciting, but the purpose I had in mind was trying to help students and others catch the vision for collecting words and starting to flesh out the entries in a collaborative way. So it would really be a combination of seeing what someone does on screen but also how they are discussing words with others, for example as they go through the DDP or the CAWL. WeSay itself is pretty self-explanatory though some reference videos would be quite helpful to people here I think so they can hold onto any teaching I give them better. But if you’re mainly doing it just one person at a time filling in data on a computer then you’re right that’s not terribly exciting to see.
I would be very interested to see how WeSay and FLEx can be used to help orthography development. Very few translators have much linguistic training and the examples of orthographies they are familiar with here are not good in many cases, so they could do with practical help for working out how to develop good orthographies for themselves.