Zahwa

Zahwa lets you produce how-to 'recipes'. Discover recipes near you, create your own version or translate other recipes into your language, and share with others.

Zahwa is intended to help document special cultural knowledge, specifically the knowledge of minority or aboriginal communities, who are typically speakers of 'small' languages and dialects. To support this aim, Zahwa allows for multi-user translation of recipes, as well as forking or re-mixing recipes.

Zahwa recipes consist of a photo slide-show with audio narrative. You first import a selection of photos and then record audio while swiping through the slides in your own time. The app also records gestures on each slide. There is an open web-based player so that recipes can be shared outside of the app. Recipes don't have to be completed all at once, and you can have more than one under construction at any time.

Zahwa is the product of academic research into innovative ways to assist small language communities document their own language and cultural knowledge. There are no adverts and we have no commercial interest in your personal data or the recipes you produce. By using Zahwa, users agree that their contributions are published under the Creative Commons licence. Zahwa supports the manual export of recipes, which doubles as a backup and restore feature. It does this by exporting a zip file which consists of the individual images, audio files and metadata.

Please note. This is beta software. We make every effort to guard against the loss of data but we cannot make guarantees. This software has bugs! The app settings has a prominent switch to enable more frequent software updates which may fix any issues you have. We very much welcome bug reports.

We offer this app under the principal that users wish to make cultural knowledge accessible to others. It's possible to create recipes and not 'publish' them (like un-listed YouTube videos) but these private use cases are not what we are focused onl, so we place limits on how many unpublished recipes you can have.

We offer the cloud storage of your data free of charge, and will not introduce any cost to you that would impede access to any work that you do. However if our hosting costs rise, we may place some limits the amount or size of recipes you make with the app, and perhaps some in-app purchase mechanism to remove these limits. This is not a plan, it's simply a possibility.

We pass Zahwa user content to Google's systems for automatic detection of prohibited content, such as rude or violent pictures. The user sign-up process is clear about what is and isn't allowed. If you upload this kind of content, we'll simply remove all of that content and your access to the app. Please don't waste our time.

Finally, some notes about sustainability. The reality is that software comes and goes. Everyone should be concerned about what happens to data, particularly data documents threatened cultural knowledge. When Zahwa becomes obsolete, our strategy is this: The raw data resulting from the use of Zahwa will be contributed to a long term archive in accordance with the best practices of the academic literature on Language Documentation. What is most likely to occur is that there will be new apps which will have access to the data from Zahwa. We aim to ensure continuity, e.g. the app (and this store entry) will tell you if Zahwa is obsolete and how to keep doing the same things with another app (hopefully), or at an absolute minimum, how to access your previous work.

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