Revolution for academics (was Scripting conference...wikis, etc.)

[Marielle Lange]

>my brother is retooling in a linguistics
>doctoral program at UT Austin after 20 years
>as a mining engineer and proprietor of El
>Universo del Ordenador in Puerto Ordaz,
>Venezuela.

>i am trying to interest him in Rev as a tool
>for linguistics. he was intriqued by the
>script, "looks like English." he may even
>be useful in compiling a Boontling/Rev
>concordance.

I am pretty sure somebody did already mention this (I am on digest mode)....
There is a concordance program written by Wilhelm Sanke. You will find a link
to his page at:
<http://revolution.lexicall.org/stacks_education.php>

>seriously, you would think that transcript
>would hold an inherent fascination for
>linguists. is Rev used much in Linguistics?

Not yet.... But yes the psycholinguistic I am is interested in revolution like I
have never been in any other software (and trust me, I have explored the
landscape of scripting/programming languages quite a lot).

But not because it's english like in the sense of *aligning* onto the English
syntax. I am personally more interested in the notion of parallel distributed
processing, connectionist networks, chaos, emergence, etc. than in the one of
grammar in the chomskian sense... I read Chomsky, this is for sure a great
thinker and the contribution of his work in terms of analysis of the *language
medium* is immense. But I am a psycholinguistic, that is that I am interested
in the representations and processes triggered in my mind when manipulating
language. I don't believe that the kind of knowledge I use in my mind when
speaking English closely corresponds to the level of abstraction Chomsky
describes. For me revolution is easy to use because of the *similarities* to
real language or similarities to my language of thought rather than proper
alignment onto english-like sentence *structure*... (it would be interesting to
evaluate possible differences in learning curvers for monolingual chinese
speakers vs monolingual spanish speakers -- could be the object of an
interesting phd in linguistics ;-)). Runrev team could maybe consider
sponsoring such a thesis). But that's a debate to have in another place.

In the past, I extensively used Awk, for rapid text manipulation and regular
expression search and replace functionalities. But you cannot do visual
interfaces with awk... The speed with which you can build a visual interface
with revolution and either directly process the data or read in and out data
processed by some unixy program is a fantastic asset. Revolution should gain to
be better known in the academic community (doing my best to convince my
colleagues).

For instance, I had students who needed to do some cleaning up of questionnaire
data. The usual way in the department is a lengthy cut/paste process with
Excel, which easily leads to manual errors. It didn't take me more than 20
minutes to explain them how to use the demo version of revolution to write a
short program to do the data cleaning automatically: I wrote a template program
and I told them what terms to look for in the doc to refine this template...
they came back the next day with all data properly cleaned up. A supervisor's
dream come true :-))).


If your brother is interested, I intend to make the equivalent of this:
<http://lexicall.org/repository/listing.php?material=data>
(automatic web-based interfacing of lexical resources like lexical database) in
a runrev framework
(see p. 43 of the document that presents the lexicall project).
<http://lexicall.org/about/LexicallWebsite.pdf>

The idea is to use a combination of the easy to program revolution and
import/export markup standards (revolution will take on in the academic
community only if it helps produce material that is not locked in a proprietary
format), to provide academics (teachers and researchers) with very easy to use
yet powerful tools. I will not detail this here, but the idea is to build a
infrastructure that will facilitate the sharing and maximum re-use of existing
resources and at the same time importantly reduce the development cost when
developing new resources.

Please invite your brother to contact me if he wants to know more :-))).  There
is good funding available for these projects nowadays (somehow related to the
notion of "grid" computing in case this is familiar to him -- it is somehow
connected to the ideas presented in Richard's excellent paper on "beyond the
browser": <http://www.fourthworld.com/embassy/articles/netapps.html>).

Marielle