News from Rome: thesis, SW workshop & Conf. for Elena Pizzuto

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
January 12, 2012

Hello Claudia, and everyone from Italy -

I am so deeply happy with this report, Claudia. Thank you for telling us about the SignWriting work in Italy, here on the SignWriting List. 

There is so much information in this report, I have read it twice and I need to read it again to absorb all that has happened.

You are right. Elena was like a vulcan, and with SignWriting, she ignited a flame that continues to light - Thank you dear Elena!

I am glad you got our small donation of SignWriting materials to the Scholarship Fund in Elena's name. And 5 presentations on SignWriting at the Conference in her honor - that just shows how much she inspired people. I did not know about the three SW research projects…I want to learn more when I can.

35 people for your SignWriting workshop in 2011 is a good number of people - and a waiting list for the next one?…that is outstanding … and the desire to write sign language poetry, and to teach in schools and to write well - that is the best!

I am happy to learn that you will be presenting your dissertation at the LREC Conference and other conferences. I look forward to reading your dissertation and seeing the videos - April and May are just around the corner...

Thank you again, Claudia, for writing this report, when I can see how busy you must be ...

Please send my best wishes to everyone and tell them I am here, in California, smiling and thinking about Italy!

Val ;-)

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On Jan 12, 2012, at 4:57 AM, Claudia S. Bianchini wrote:

> Hello Valerie and everyone,
> Valerie askes me to tell you what happen with my PhD thesis on SW and with the workshop on SW that took place in Rome one month ago. I tried to send this mail some days ago, but maybe it haven't been sent. So I'll send it again. Hope you will not double-recieve it. I add also a short comment about the conference in honor of Elena Antinoro Pizzuto (1952-2011) that took place in Rome (Italy) 2 days ago.
> 
> So...
> My thesis... I'm reaching the end... I think I'll expose it on April or May. I have to write an abstract in English before my discussion so I'll send you as soon as it will be ready. But I'm very happy about the reflections of deaf people experts of SW I managed to collect; I hope it can become a starting point to make SW (and research about it) progressing more and more..
> By the way, Fabrizio Borgia (my informatics colleague who is developing software for SW) and I will be at LREC Conference this spring and we plan to go to 2 or 3 other Informatics' conference to explain my researches and his software (that is an alternative to signmaker). I'll send you the articles as soon as they will be published (this time they will be in english...).
> 
> About the workshop... It was great! we where 35, 20 deaf and 15 hearing people. We organise it on 3 days so it was very intensive lessons, but they were all very interested, so they payed attention for all the time. At the end they where quite able to write in SW, so we hope they will continue using it outside, spreading SW all over Italy! It was great to see them going further the mere SW lesson, asking us things about the implication of having a writing system for SL, the possibility to use SW with deaf childs at scool or to write down a poem (there was 2 very famous italian deaf poets learning SW with us). So we are very satisfy of the workshop and we hope to do it again in a few months... we already have people in "waiting list" for the next workshop so... all is positve :-)
> 
> At the conference for Elena Antinoro Pizzuto everything has been in the right way! We were more than 40 speakers (and more or less 100 more people listening/seeing the conference), and everyone remembered Elena and her works. The room was so full of emotions!!! It was really great to see that for all of us Elena was like a volcan, spreading everywhere a need to know everything, not only in scientific's fields, but also about human being. There was 5 presentations speaking of SW, 2 focussed on the system SW (from me and from the SW group of the ISTC-CNR) and 3 focussed on research using SW (from G. Gianfreda, G. Petitta and E. Wilkinson).
> 
> Claudia S. Bianchini
> PhD Student @ Univ. Paris8 + CNRS-UMR7023-SFL
> PhD Student @ Univ. Studi di Perugia + CNR-ISTC-SLDS
> chiadu14 at tiscali.it
> 

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