One piece, from writing to multilingual publication
A live demonstration of Lera
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
Over the past two days 'language-agnostic knowledge' has been mentioned many times. In this session, rather than talk about it, we show it. Sajad Sepehri, the architect and designer of Lera, and Arash Sadeghi follow a single piece of knowledge before the audience, from its first sentence to its publication in two languages, in the same system in which this conference and its programme were built.
In Lera a piece is the smallest complete and reusable unit of knowledge. It has a stable identity, its body is versioned, and whatever grows around it, from translations to sources and links, is recorded separately from the body. A translation is not a second copy of the piece; it is a representation of the same piece, and it stays tied to the original.
What is shown, in order
- Writing the piece in Persian in the Studio: paragraphs, a title, and a teaching 'explanation' box that keeps its place in every language.
- Adding sources to the library and citing them from within the text, without the source becoming part of the piece's body.
- Writing the English translation by hand, paragraph by paragraph, as a representation of the same piece; and seeing how a later change to the original marks the translation as out of date.
- Placing the same piece in the structure of a project: in this conference's programme and in another collection, without making a copy.
- Attaching an event to the piece's place in the programme, and seeing that the day, the session and the talk are all read from the project's structure.
- Publishing, and reading the piece once with a Persian interface and once with an English one: the language of the interface and the language of the content are two separate things.
- A look at the version history: who changed what, and when.
After the demonstration, participants can use a test account in the library atrium to write a piece, translate it and place it in a sample project. Technical questions about the architecture, the data model and the design principles are answered in the same session.
References
Vrandečić, Denny, and Markus Krötzsch. 2014. 'Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledgebase.' Communications of the ACM 57 (10): 78–85.
Wilkinson, Mark D., et al. 2016. 'The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship.' Scientific Data 3: 160018.