‘What is StoryWeaver?’
Purvi Shah, Sr Director — StoryWeaver, talks to Michael Swanton about the tremendous work StoryWeaver is doing with partners like Endless Oaxaca Multilingüe
Michael Swanton is a Mesoamericanist linguist/philologist in Oaxaca.
Since February 2019, the Project Endless Oaxaca Multilingüe (EOM) of the Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú Oaxaca has made use of the StoryWeaver platform to generate content in Chatino, Chocholteco, Mixe, Triqui, and other languages for the Oaxacan version of Endless Oaxaca Multilingüe. Based on this experience and the positive reception of the stories in Oaxaca, the EOM Project and StoryWeaver are exploring new dimensions of this partnership to create children’s reading materials in the indigenous languages of Oaxaca and Mexico.
In June 2021, Michael Swanton (MS) interviewed Purvi Shah (PS), Senior Director — StoryWeaver. Read the entire interview in Spanish here.
MS: What is StoryWeaver?
PS: StoryWeaver is an initiative of Pratham Books. So, before I tell you about StoryWeaver, I must tell you about Pratham Books!
Pratham Books is a not-for-profit children’s book publisher based out of India. Every second child in India cannot read at his or her grade level. This immense reading deficit comes from a variety of reasons, including the lack of quality reading material in mother tongue languages and the dearth of reading material beyond textbooks in school. Without easy access to books in their mother tongue languages, children struggle to learn to read and practice their reading skills. Pratham Books was set up in 2004, and our mission is to put “a book in every child’s hand”. Since then, we have been creating engaging storybooks in multiple Indian languages and formats to help children discover the joy of reading. We set up a digital crowdfunding platform to help organisations set up libraries. We also created a ‘Library in a Classroom’ bag, a foldable carrier with about a hundred books that can be hung on two pins on the wall of any classroom. But one of the questions that kept coming up was: how could we continue to bring books to children in a sustainable and scalable manner to accelerate progress towards SDG4 — Quality Education For All?
We responded to this imperative in 2015 — on International Literacy Day, September 8 — by launching StoryWeaver (www.storyweaver.org.in), a digital platform built for scale, to address the scarcity of books for children through a new approach for book creation and distribution.
At its core, StoryWeaver is a repository of high-quality, openly licensed multilingual storybooks. Every book is freely available in multiple formats. They can be read online, and keeping in mind the digital divide — can also be read offline, downloaded, printed, and even repurposed, so that no child is left behind. We host content from other global publishers as well. Translation and versioning tools help customize the books for localized requirements and these resources become available to other users as well, creating a multiplier effect and amplifying impact. StoryWeaver was launched with 800 books in 24 languages in 2015. A little more than 5 years later, in July 2021, we have over 40,200 books in 306 languages.
MS: How was StoryWeaver adapted to other languages and parts of the world outside of India?
PS: UNESCO states that 40% of the global population does not have access to books in their mother tongue. To become readers, children must have access to books in languages they speak and understand. How can we tackle these challenges at scale? We strongly believe in the power of collaboration and distributing the ability to solve the issue of book scarcity — this is one of the main guiding principles of our platform. All you need is digital access and a free StoryWeaver login ID, and you can create or translate and publish a story.
We put in a lot of effort to make StoryWeaver’s experience and tools very user-friendly and inclusive. In the very first week since we launched StoryWeaver, we received a request to add the language Khmer. StoryWeaver is Unicode-compliant, which enables the quick addition of complex scripts. In just 48 hours, users could come to the platform and translate books into Khmer. Product development follows an ‘outside-in’ approach: User insight mining, collaborations with disadvantaged communities have helped shape and introduce platform features like the Offline Library, phone-OTP log-in for educators who don’t have email, and Mobile Translate.
We focus on nurturing talent across languages underrepresented in children’s book publishing. Through sustained community engagement and platform analytics, we identify and empower translation partners and individual language champions. We have codified and shared our learnings to empower actors who create, translate, review and use the content.
These approaches have helped us create a passionate community — people and organizations from around the world, whose efforts have contributed to our content and diverse language representation, including endangered languages (something we had never imagined!). Publishing in underrepresented languages enables self-expression, inclusiveness. 61% of the languages on StoryWeaver are indigenous, 12% are vulnerable — providing a digital footprint for marginalized languages and aiding their preservation. While our users come from different parts of the world and speak & understand different languages, all of us share a common aim — that children must have access to books in their mother tongue.
In addition to the above, we are also putting our ‘open’ philosophy into practice in the following ways: Pratham Books, as a publisher that’s also a platform, makes original content openly available on StoryWeaver — making this a hub from which multiple platforms like Google’s Read Along, Let’s Read Asia, Global Digital Library and others pull content. StoryWeaver’s architecture is built for scale and we have open-sourced our code. Room to Read customized this to launch their version of StoryWeaver, https://literacycloud.org, taking books to the millions of children they serve worldwide. We also offer local language gateways, with the first instance being in Farsi and Pashto for Darakht-e Danesh Library, Afghanistan, https://ddl.storyweaver.org.in/.
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MS: You say you hadn’t foreseen working with such languages, but of course India, like Mexico, is one of the countries with the greatest linguistic diversity in the world. Have you found the same sort of response within India for this?
PS: Yes! When we launched, we were hoping to scale our content into India’s 22 official languages — today, we have content in 80 Indian languages! StoryWeaver’s language footprint reflects the linguistic diversity of India, with storybooks in mainstream Indian languages (Hindi, Kannada, Marathi), classical languages (Sanskrit), indigenous languages (Kora, Pawari), minority languages (Konkani), and endangered languages (Mundari, Toto).
We have learned a lot from our community. For instance, our partners and users have taught us how books of a particular language can be made available in multiple scripts. Take, for example, StoryWeaver’s collaboration with the organization Suchana in West Bengal, India that works with the development of the Kora and Santal indigenous communities in that region. The Santali language has a StoryWeaver library in three scripts — Ol Chiki, Bengali, and Devanagari. StoryWeaver’s repository of openly-licensed books in Bengali (which acts as a bridge language for translation) and its translation tool have made quick content creation possible and have empowered Suchana’s educator-translators to translate and publish over 200 storybooks into Kora and Santali. Several hundred children are now reading a real variety of books in their own languages — from very simple to more complex books. Suchana is also using StoryWeaver to create bilingual storybooks in Bengali-Kora and Bengali-Santali. This enables more effective communication in the classroom — willing Bengali-speaking teachers can read the books with the children in their own mother tongues, and help the children learn Bengali as a second language. They have also printed and distributed copies of these books to government schools, pre-schools, and other organizations in the region. The print and digital books are incorporated into their mobile library programme, reaching children in 25 villages. In some cases, these books are ‘First Books’ — in 6 Kora villages, the language was never printed before! This access has unlocked several benefits: The children can understand what they read; they decipher the codes of literacy more quickly; they feel included.
MS: With open licenses and the technological possibility of producing your own translation of a story so quickly, where does this leave the role of the editor? There was a recent case in Mexico where a local editor produced a book in an indigenous language and how the person chose to write the language received some criticism, with the observation that it probably would have been good to involve an editor or some sort of proofreader. These are some of the services that normally editorial companies provide. How do you see that? Have you had similar problems?
PS: We have the utmost respect for authors, editors, translators, proofreaders, and all other stakeholders who are an integral part of the publishing ecosystem. As a publisher of high-quality children’s books since 2004, Pratham Books has deep experience in developing original content and translating it into multiple languages. We have captured this experience to develop tool kits, training modules, and manuals to share this with organizations and educators who are interested in translating into new languages. We developed a translation sprint workshop model that has been used extensively in many countries to translate books into new languages and it includes a peer-to-peer review system that aids the quality checking of books that are created.
The children’s book publishing industry is largely driven by demand-based economics, to the detriment of creating books for economically weaker groups, where the profit motive is low. Thus, creating a new model in publishing to address the literary inequities that exist globally — not enough children’s books in not enough languages, with issues of poor access, is imperative. A model that combines the power of technology and collaboration can help solve the global challenge of creating book security for children. StoryWeaver is one such unique innovative publishing model that is a digital repository of multilingual stories for children that not only gives free and open access to reading resources, but also provides collaborative tools that allow users to adapt the content to their needs. At StoryWeaver, we enable publishing at scale and have transformed the ‘traditional’ role of the publisher, by allowing any user to create or translate content. At the same time, we are committed to quality. There are several ways we enable this…
Firstly, we are deeply committed to encouraging and enabling publishers to share their content on the platform, so that there is a strong nucleus of high-quality content to translate from. In addition to Pratham Books, we also have content from publishers like Room to Read and Book Dash. We work very closely with publishers, some of whom have never open-licensed their content before, to do exactly this.
Then comes the challenge of vetting translation quality into 300 languages (and counting!). We have developed several models for this. One of them is to onboard ‘Verified Partners’. For example, the African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA) is one of our verified partners on the platform. We carry out a verification process for our partners, and once onboarded, we trust that the books that they translate / create / publish on the platform are going to have certain quality assurances. Therefore the books published by them can be identified with a tick mark or a verified tag. These books are also ranked higher in searches when a user is looking for books, and furthermore, they are recommended for other users only titles that come up for translation.
We also have a quality control initiative to vet user-generated content, via a detailed review process, which allows for the rating of the books on several parameters. This helps us identify good writers and translators, and recommend high-quality content to our users.
MS: Looking to the future, how would you like to see StoryWeaver develop?
PS: StoryWeaver is keenly focused on accelerating our work around three core pillars — creation, access, and use — of openly licensed children’s books. We are developing foundational learning programmes, associated teaching resources, and content in mother tongue languages to build for education in the post-pandemic world, to ensure that no child is left behind. In terms of technology, we are interested in exploring how we can leverage AI for contextualizing children’s books.
Another key goal is to collaborate with partners from around the globe to make available robust sets of hyper-localized, verified content in every language, to unlock these barriers of access, and by 2030 — by when the world needs to achieve SDG4 — give all children access to a sizeable number of books in their mother tongue.
MS: Now that we are coming out of the pandemic, where do you see the future of digital technology and education going?
PS: The pandemic has had a pervasive impact on all aspects of development across the globe, and has exacerbated the existing learning crisis. It is a very stark reality that there are large numbers of younger children who have been out of formal schooling for 2 years and are not acquiring crucial foundational literacy skills. The need for equitable access to educational inputs is more urgent than ever.
StoryWeaver has been focused on supporting young learners, educators, and caregivers during this challenging time. StoryWeaver witnessed a huge global uptick in usage as a result of children being at home due to forced school closures. Educators, literacy organisations, community libraries, reading clubs integrated StoryWeaver’s open digital materials into online classes. As part of our COVID-19 efforts, we pivoted quickly to curate, as well as accelerate the creation of content. Responding to user needs, we created Learn At Home resources with grade-wise books to make it easy for educators to choose from our repository. We partnered with UNESCO and other global organizations on the Translate-A-Story campaign, scaled our Reading Programme and themed Book Lists into several languages, and boosted our audio-visual resources, and made them available in more languages.
An initiative that yielded great results was a collaboration with UNICEF and the Education Department in the Indian state of Maharashtra, one of the country’s biggest states. We rolled out a state-level reading intervention to keep children engaged and learning even during school closures. The initiative leveraged resources from the Reading Programme on StoryWeaver, which offers age-appropriate books and associated activities in multiple languages. We digitally disseminated this whole programme via WhatsApp, and since all the content was openly licensed, the books reached the children through multiple channels, online and offline — including printouts, projecting on TV screens, broadcasting the stories on loudspeakers, and several community-level innovations. 2.5 million children were impacted through this initiative.
We have observed that digital adoption has happened at a much faster pace because of the pandemic and the need for quickly adapting to remote learning. We believe that blended models (offline and online) are here to stay. We hope to see an increase in government investment in digital infrastructure and training. Technology and open-licensed content have the power to give children uninterrupted access to the resources they need to continue their reading and learning journeys. Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver is committed to making this a reality, and building a strong, vibrant culture of reading.
We thank Michael Swanton and Endless Oaxaca Multilingüe for their abundant co-operation in furthering our efforts.
StoryWeaver hosts over 500 stories in these languages, most of which are due to the mobilisation efforts of Endless Oaxaca Multilingüe. Read the entire collection of storybooks for free here.
