Do you love data? Do you believe algorithms can help decide what to binge watch on Netflix next and drive social change ? DataKind is an organisation that ‘brings together top data scientists with leading social change organisations to collaborate on cutting-edge analytics and advanced algorithms to maximize social impact.’ To describe the mission of DataKind in the words of it's co-founder, Jake Porway: "We are meticulously focused on bringing data science in all its forms to those who share our vision of a sustainable planet in which we all have access to our basic human needs. We envision a world where organizations tackling those problems have the same access to data science resources that Wall St. and Silicon Valley have."

StoryWeaver is one of four projects chosen for DataKind Bangalore’s Sprint 2018. Sprint consists of a series of events where volunteers of DataKind Bangalore use their Data Science skill to solve challenges experienced by their Non-profit partners. If you’d like to volunteer your skills to our project, read on for more details.

Using technology to address the global book drought

Pratham Books is a non-profit children’s book publisher with a mission is to see ‘a book in every child’s hand’ and was founded to address the lack of high quality, affordable, multilingual books in India. 

                                              

However, to even begin satisfying the reading needs of a multilingual country such as India, and create equitable access to books for all children we would need to massively scale the creation and distribution of multilingual content. The answer, we believed lay in technology and the power of open licensing.  

StoryWeaver: One platform. Many possibilities.

On StoryWeaver, users can access thousands of multilingual stories for children absolutely free. All content on the platform is openly licensed under CC-BY4.0, one of the most liberal Creative Commons Licenses. Users can read, download and print all stories and images on the platform, as well as use the tools embedded on StoryWeaver to create and translate content into more languages and versions. In the 2 years since launch we have grown from a repository of 800 stories in 24 languages to a digital repository of over 8000 stories in 111 diverse languages of the world. The 650,000 member strong StoryWeaver community is spread across 220 countries and have read our stories both online and offline over 2.6 million times.  

Project Scalability and Sustainability

StoryWeaver’s growth and ability to scale lies in the fact that the platform is Unicode compliant. This enables content to be transported to different devices easily, and also allows users to create content in their desired language without needing to download special Indic language keyboards. This is imperative, especially in a country like India where there are so many languages in varied scripts.

In addition, Unicode compliancy  has allowed us to add new languages with relative ease, even those with complex scripts like Khmer. Today, StoryWeaver offers users the chance to read, create and translate stories in a plethora of languages: from mainstream Indian and International languages, to tribal (Kora, Santali, Kurukh) and minority languages (Tibetan, Konkani), and even languages categorised as threatened or endangered (Southern Kurdish).

Impact

StoryWeaver has opened up a stream of collaborations with organizations, both in India and globally.

As a classroom tool, StoryWeaver provides educators access to thousands of stories, across genres, reading levels and in multiple languages, for use in the classroom. Teachers can tailor existing content to suit the needs of their students or create brand new teaching resources. Educators have used the platform to create early reading material in minority languages like Tibetan and endangered languages like Kurdish. Rural schools in Maharashtra have downloaded and projected our stories on to classroom walls with the help of Pragat Shikshan Sanstha. Communities Rising downloads and prints much needed books in Tamil and English for after school resource centres in Villupuram, Tamil Nadu. While organisations and schools like Mantra4Change, Akanksha and Tamarind Tree  create digital libraries for students and teachers using our content. Content from StoryWeaver has also been gamified on affordable learning apps for disadvantaged children to improve their English, while Bookshare uses StoryWeaver to create accessible content for print impaired children.

By harnessing the power of technology and open licenses and adding the creative power of a collaborative and engaged community, StoryWeaver is working towards addressing the scarcity of multilingual reading resources that exists not only in India but across the world.

Focus Area For DataKind Sprint

As content on StoryWeaver continues to exponentially grow, one of the spaces we wish to improve in is the discoverability of our content. Users on our platform should be able to easily find what they are looking for in our vast repository of 8000 books.

This will be possible with better tagging of our content. While there is a basic tagging process in place for all images and stories on platform, if every story published is automatically tagged with 10 - 25 relevant keywords, it would drastically improve the discoverability of content. Additional steps would include incorporating the most searched words in our tags and even incorporate geotags. We strongly believe these steps would greatly improve the user experience.

StoryWeaver would like to collaborate with DataKind Bangalore to build such a tool during Sprint 2018.

For more details about the Project Accelerator (First event of the Sprint) and to sign up, visit their meetup page here. Also, You may like to join DataKind Bangalore’s slack channel  #pratham_books to actively participate in various discussions.

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Swati Pandit is pursuing her BA in NMKRV College For Women. She loves learning languages and is fluent in 16 of them! She is passionate about music and is learning the violin and flute and can also play the keyboard, guitar, ukulele. She also sings, writes and composes poetry!  Recently her book of poetry Trilingual Poetry got released by professor Dr.S.Ranganath.
 

Q: What type of person do you think makes the best translator for children’s stories?

According to me a person who can think from the perspective of a child....A person who is open to various changes.... And a person who can imagine widely and wildly is the best translator for children's stories.

Q: Do you have any advice for anyone interested in becoming a translator?

My advice is that, please come and discover this amazing world of translating. This work requires a lot of patience and passion. So, people interested out there set your brains on fire and you'll fall in love with translating.

Q:  What is your personal relationship to language and/or translation?

Each language has its own beauty. And I see each language as a beautiful living entity. This is a musical instrument which brings people from various places together.

Q:  When you’ve been given a story to translate, what’s your process, and how long does it generally take?

I have a habit of reading the given story twice... First I give a general reading then I thoroughly read it again...I understand the gist and go on with the translation... It takes 4 to 5 days for the final version.

Q:  What do stories in translation bring to young readers?

If a story is translated in their very own or their dear language they will feel delighted to read it. They will read the story with ease and will get some interest towards reading more.

Q: You’ve translated stories for us. Which has been your favorite to work on?

My most favorite stories are Chutti and Cyborg Taata.
 

Q: What is the hardest thing about translating from English into Kannada? How do you navigate words or phrases that are tricky to translate??

Sometimes finding appropriate words at the right places becomes tricky and then choosing the nearer word becomes the solution. Sometimes this paves the way for inserting a new and interesting phrase. Sometimes change in the voice is needed. It's challenging but it's fun at the same time.

Q: How do you feel when your story reaches the child?

I feel satisfied and really happy that a child can understand and interpret things!

Q:  Translating stories must have required research when it came to STEM related terms and concepts.. How did you explore new objects and concepts?

When it comes to STEM stories I have referred to some books and understood what it is and then I proceeded. While translating Cyborg Dadu to Kannada I got to know various things about how cyborg can change mankind etc. It has really expanded my knowledge.

Q:  As a Multilingual Translator, Young Poet how do you connect yourself with Children's Literature, what do you feel is the challenge in this regard?

Children's literature is known for its widespread imagination and energising themes and being a poet requires childlike heart. More than challenge I feel that it is a trigger to the monotonous mind of mine.
 

Q:  As a student and voracious reader, Stories in which form are best received by kids? Poetry, Picture books, Read aloud etc?

According to me, poetry and picture books are the best ones to give into a child's hand because the rhythm of the  poetry tends to get registered in their minds. And picture books makes their thinking more colorful and picture is grasped by them very quickly. I personally am a great fan of picture and poetry books.

 

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The cutest, warmest, furriest and squishiest photos of kids are the ones in which they are cuddling up with a loving animal. Well now, we can't send an animal your way but  what we CAN give you is a list of books that you can cuddle up with, along with excited little humans. Books about animals - funny, unpredictable, generous, strange, friendly, loud and just adorable.

Good Night, Tinku By Preethi Nambiar, Sonal Goyal and Sumit Sakhuja

Afraid of the dark? We all are sometimes. Here comes Tinku the dog, who explored the dark and found…. friends! Tag along where he wags on, and meet some new animals that are wide awake when you are deep asleep. From Hindi to Sanskrit, from French to Italian, we have all these translations available for you, and more!

 

Anaya's Thumb by Natasha Sharma and Ruchi Shah

Anaya has a bad habit. She keeps sucking her thumb! Know anyone like that? But then one day she went to the zoo and quit. Read about the human and animal behavior she witnesses before making this decision. Apart from a number of Indian languages, this book is also available in German and Portuguese.

 

Sniffles, the Crocodile and Punch, the Butterfly by Herminder Ohri

A big, strong animal that cries and a light as feather one that likes to punch! Let's go beyond the deceptive waters of someone's cover and read about this amazing friendship that… saved lives! Do you know Sniffles, the crocodile also speaks in Kiswahili and IsiXhosa?

 

Clean Cat by Kanchan Bannerjee and Deepa Balsavar

It doesn't matter how long you've been living somewhere, you will never know your neighborhood as well as a cat. This Clean Cat is up to all kinds of fun and antics. Read in 6 languages including Urdu, Marathi and two bilingual versions too.

 

Samira's Awful Lunch by Bharati Jagannathan and Preeti Krishnamurthy

How many of you have heard of kids complaining about what they got for lunch? *raises hand* You too? That's what we thought. Well, we have some very kind animals in this book who are willing to share ideas for food alternatives. Do read and find out what Samira finally chooses!

 

ಕಾಗೆ ಬಳಗವ ಕರೆಯಿತು (The Generous Crow) by Venkatramana Gowda and Padmanabh

It's hard to be in a classroom full of students and  feel 'different' or smaller than the others. It's probably like being a small crow in a huge forest full of animals that seem better than you. This is a story in Assamese, Telegu and Tamil in which a crow 'Caws Caws' his way through a journey of self-identity and self-esteem.

 

Noisy Crows by Kanchan Bannerjee and Deepa Balsavar

Here's another story about crows and this one is just plain NOISY! Available in Hindi, Marathi and Kannada along with English as bilingual books, find out which animal likes this crow's singing.

 

The Jungle Book by Madhav Chavan, Meera Tendolkar and Ketan Raut

Available in Punjabi, Odia and three African languages, this book follows a few animal friends who hear about an exciting new development in the forest. Their jungle has a school! So they go in search of it and wait for the teacher. Guess who turns up?

 

Busy Ants by Kanchan Bannerjee and Deepa Balsavar

Have you ever seen ants just loitering about or sitting in the shade passing their time? No, they are always busy, and they have some unique traits and skills too! You can read all about them in Malayalam and Tamil, along with other languages.

 

भीमा गधा (Bheema, the Sleepyhead) by Kiran Kasturia and Shweta Mohapatra

Translated in 14 languages, this book tries to answer a fundamental question of our existence: how does a person (in this case, a donkey) wake up early in the morning? Bheema likes to sleep like a log, and it doesn't matter who tries to wake him up. See what finally works for him. Maybe it will work for you too?

 

Do you have a favourite animal story? Tell us what it is in the comments, or on Twitter and Facebook!

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