C-LARA

This week, I have continued with items from the “Further work” section of the report. The AI and I have extended the “Activity tracker” functionality, so that it can now act as an improved version of Rina’s “Continuity journal” idea, and we have started discussing an idea which would combine the “bilingual lexicon” and “C-LARA picture book/alphabet book” threads.

Note that the Zoom call will have changed again for some people due to the change to Australian winter time, details at end.

Cleaning up the repository modules

The transition to ORM handling of database relations should now be complete. It was an interesting exercise from the point of view of human/AI software collaboration; Chat and I have written it up at length here.

Legacy LARA content

Belinda and I have been talking with the UniSA infrastructure people. They say we should have new disk space within the next few days, and then we can start uploading the old LARA content.

Workshop

Pauline, Christèle and I have started discussing the upcoming workshop at Flinders. More about that soon.

Lexica and images

Chat and I have been looking at the idea that Anne-Laure and Stéphanie suggested of supporting bilingual lexica in C-LARA, extending it so that these lexica can be multimodal and in particular include DALL-E-3-generated images. We think this is potentially very promising, and would fit together well with the “C-LARA picture book” and “C-LARA alphabet book” ideas that many people are interested in. I sent out a mail about this a couple of days ago, we should discuss.

Activity tracker/continuity journal

It occurred to me yesterday that we could co-opt the activity tracker to implement a better version of Rina’s “Continuity journal” idea. It never quite delivered in its original form, but intuitively it’s so appealing that you feel there must be some way to do it! I have just put the revised scheme on the server, here are the details:

• The activity tracker, which you’ll find under Social Network > Activities, has been improved to produce a structured table including search functionality.
• A plain-text view, available to admins, offers the same functionality, but returning the results in a form that can be cut and pasted into ChatGPT-4’s input buffer.
• There is also functionality to let the AI reply. It does this by producing a piece of JSON in an agreed-on format which I can cut and paste into another admin-only view. The JSON contains primitives to let it post comments and create new activities in the activity tracker.

In short, the AI not only has a much better overview of what has been going on (the “continuity journal” aspect); it can also interact directly with everyone in C-LARA, not just with me. I am really curious to see how this changes the dynamics of the project.

Next Zoom call

Note: times have changed again for Australian people after we’ve moved to winter time

The next call will be at:

Thu Apr 11 2024, 18:00 Adelaide (= 08.30 Iceland = 09.30 Ireland/Faroe Islands = 10.30 Europe = 11.30 Israel = 12.00 Iran = 16.30 China = 18:30 Melbourne = 19.30 New Caledonia)