C-LARA

I have started implementing two items listed in the “Further work” section of the project report: migrating repository modules to use the Django database uniformly, and hosting legacy LARA content at UniSA. We got some funding for a workshop, and Pauline and I submitted a proposal.

Note that the Zoom call is one hour earlier for several people due to the change to European summer time, details at end.

Cleaning up the repository modules

For historical reasons – we did them before we implemented the Django layer – some repository modules in C-LARA use plain SQL rather than Django’s much more compact and elegant Object-Relational Mapper (ORM). They are in consequence ugly and hard to maintain. Chat and I have started transitioning them to ORM. Chat is able to write nearly all the code, and it’s going well. We have already transitioned the audio repository successfully, and the others should be very similar.

This change will have no effect on what the user sees, but it will be much easier to extend and modify these parts of the codebase in future.

Legacy LARA content

Long-term, we want to be able to import all the legacy LARA content into C-LARA. But there are quite a lot of things that need to be added before C-LARA supports all the LARA functionality, and it won’t happen immediately. Until then, I’ve set things up so that we can host compiled LARA content on the server in the original form and make it available as “external content”. As usual with sysadmin type tasks, Chat could give me clear recipes that worked first time, and I have put up two sample pieces of content:

• Le Bonheur, Chadi’s rather fine recording of the classic Maupassant short story.
• Offering scene, the cute hieroglyphics example we did for the 2022 EUROCALL paper.

I was going to install everyone’s favourite, Le petit prince, but when I tried to unpack the zipfile on the server I found we had insufficient disk space. I have mailed the UniSA sysadmins to ask for more, if possible about 100GB. That should let us post all the legacy LARA content and leave a good margin for expansion.

Workshop

We have received a few thousand euros of funding to organise a workshop on using speech and language technology for Pacific languages, to be held at Flinders U. Originally it was supposed to be in April, but they have been so slow about making the decision that May seems the earliest feasible option. We will discuss next week after Pauline gets back from vacation – this was primarily her idea.

Proposal to “Imminent”

Pauline and I submitted a rather speculative proposal to Imminent. The theme ended up being extensions and enhancements to phonetic text support in C-LARA. It got written absolutely at the last minute, and I am less than optimistic, but the only thing you know for sure with proposals is that if you don’t submit, you don’t get funded 🙂

Report

I posted a review of the second progress report on Goodreads. It didn’t take long to write, and I figured it would probably attract some attention.

Next Zoom call

Note: one hour earlier in several places, Europe has changed to summer time.

The next call will be at:

Thu Apr 4 2024, 19:00 Adelaide (= 08.30 Iceland = 09.30 Ireland/Faroe Islands = 10.30 Europe = 11.30 Israel = 12.00 Iran = 16.30 China = 19:30 Melbourne/New Caledonia)