Jack or Gilbert In A Box (JIAB or GIAB)

Vision The concept of C.S. (Jack) Lewis or G. (Gilbert) K. Chesterton In A Box stems from a television interview I heard with Ray Bradbury in which he described the perfect school as a garden in which simulacrums of the great men and women of the past interacted with students.  Two of my own favorite great men are C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton.  Both wrote a great deal.  JIAB or GIAB is the idea of deriving from the entire works of a person an integrated representation of their thought.  In another part of this website this has been discussed.

G. K. Chesterton GIAB       C. S. Lewis JIAB

Objectives  The objectives of such a project, well beyond the current state of art, need to be humble at the beginning.  For example one needs to develop tools to parse writings, accumulate vocabularies, try to distinguish between various modes of expression, settle a wide variety of issues about meaning, and so forth.  There are some very interesting projects which might be mined for ideas ranging from the work of Lakoff and Johnson on Metaphor to the Cyc Project which attempts to encode human common sense knowledge that a person would have to have to understand an encyclopedia.  JIAB lies in that same concept space, but is more humble in some ways and more ambitious in others.

Matt Gibbs, Adam Hollenberg, and Jessica Taylor developed at Requirements Documents after discussion JIAB which may be found here.  We hope to be able to develop this further in subsequent semesters.