Date of Award

6-6-2013

Document Type

Thesis

Publisher

Santa Clara : Santa Clara University

Department

Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Silvia Figueira

Abstract

Many Santa Clara University students have the luxury of having access to devices such as iPads and eBook readers which support many applications that make our lives easier. The numerous ways to read digital books today has significantly lowered the cost of gaining access to educational material. However, in rural developing communities in countries like India, this is not the case. Currently in India, people in some developing communities have basic mobile phones called feature phones which can perform basic functionalities such as texting, calling, and browsing the web. Feature phones are affordable and very popular in developing communities. There is currently no set standard for reading ebooks on these phones and no applications specifically designed to view books on them. Through online books, people can have access to a wealth of information from which they can obtain educational resources. Anudip and iMerit, two organizations based in India that train and employ women to make online books, work with publishers who are readily digitizing books for expensive devices such as smart phones and eReaders. These companies currently do not have a tool that allows basic feature phones to gain access to online books. As a solution, we constructed a web tool customized for Anudip and iMerit which digitizes printed text into a format viewable on basic feature phones. Our web system, MUVE, successfully converts text into Extensible Markup Language, XML, a format understood by major browsers. While there are already existing efforts to bridge the education and employment gap in rural communities through companies such as biNu, which makes apps for feature phones and allows users to download books, there are no efforts that utilize XML, a much more readable, simple, and usable language that is much easier to interpret on feature phones. (Cave, 2013) For the final step of our tool, MUVE compresses the XML data into a file available for download. We took into consideration the importance of partitioning the data files into smaller pieces so that the information can be downloaded by users who have low bandwidth connections. The final output of our completed system is a folder of XML files containing the chapters of a book. This conversion tool will be delivered and installed; however, these files need to be filtered through a simple XML interpreter. The construction of this XML interpreter will happen simultaneously with the installation of our system on the Anudip and iMerit servers in India. Ultimately, our tool will hopefully grant better access to online books through mobile phones, thereby promoting better education, and will also provide more jobs for women through employment with Anudip and iMerit.

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