C-LARA

This week, I have been concentrating on three things: social network functionality, presentation, and an initial integration of DALL-E-3 into C-LARA. There have also been some interesting discussions with Claudia, Christèle and Pauline about moving towards initial user testing.

Social network

I’ve already posted about the social network part here. We now have a substantially expanded set of functionalities including friending, displaying user profiles, links in content, and email alerts.

Presentation

Here, I’ve done two things, both in response to suggestions from Claudia:

• Tooltips. We’ve now got tooltips installed on the top-level menu and the project actions menu. This means that if you hover over a link, you’ll see an informative piece of text explaining what the function in question does.
• HTML markup. It’s now possible to add HTML markup to the text, e.g. tags like <i> for italics, <h1> for a top-level heading, and so on.

DALL-E-3

I have added a preliminary integration of DALL-E-3 into C-LARA. If you go to the ‘Add/Remove Images’ view on a project, you now get a new option at the top to use DALL-E-3. So far the only way to use it is to pass the entire text of the project and get a single image back, but we can certainly add more options once we’ve experimented a bit.

Example

Here is an example, “Space kangaroo”, that I just posted. I manually added a title page in the ‘Segmented Text’ view, the top of which now looks like this:

I also told DALL-E-3 to create an image. The first page in the rendered text comes out like this:

I think this functionality will be a lot of fun to play with when we’ve refined it a bit!

Moving towards user testing

Things are getting more concrete regarding user testing:

• Romanian. Claudia and her colleague Lucretia are thinking of using C-LARA at a Romanian school in Holland, where kids with Romanian backgrounds come for a couple of hours a week to try and keep in touch with their heritage language. This is similar to the use case we discussed last year with Dr Cui, the lecturer in Mandarin at Adelaide Uni.
• French. Christèle is thinking of using C-LARA with one of her French classes. Students would form small teams of 2-3 people to create C-LARA picturebook texts.
• Drehu. Pauline’s colleague Fabrice, a native speaker of Drehu, got back to us about the Drehu alphabet book. He was enthusiastic and says he will soon finish recording the audio. They can then think about how to trial it in New Caledonia.

Next Zoom call

Thu Jan 11, 2023, 20:00 Adelaide (= 09.30 Iceland = 09.30 Ireland/Faroe Islands = 10.30 Europe = 11.30 Israel = 13.00 Iran = 17.30 China = 20:30 Melbourne/New Caledonia)