REPORT: Annual Membership Meeting 2003

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting Report
January 12, 2002

REPORT:
Annual Membership Meeting
January 2, 2003

Dear SW List members:
On January 2, 2003, we held our annual SignWriting Membership Meeting.
Usually our Meeting is held at the end of January, but this year we
held it early, because of a special guest, Dr. Cecilia Flood.

Cecilia visited us on New Years to present us with a very special gift:
Her completed dissertation: "HOW DO DEAF AND HARD OF HEARING STUDENTS
EXPERIENCE LEARNING TO WRITE USING SIGNWRITING, A WAY TO READ AND WRITE
SIGNS?"

Cecilia received her doctorate in Educational Linguistics at the
University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in December, 2002, and is the
first person in the United States to write a dissertation specifically
about SignWriting and its importance for Deaf children in Deaf
Education. The positive results of her findings are now written in her
dissertation, which is 283 pages long, and will be available to the
general public, through the University publishing system, in Spring
2003. Just as soon as copies are available, I will announce it to the
List. I predict that everyone will be impressed to see how beautifully
the Deaf children learned SignWriting, and how it gave them an added
sense of self-esteem and pride in their own language.

So our SignWriting Membership Meeting this year was an exciting one,
because Cecilia brought a lap top computer with a video presentation of
the Deaf children using SignWriting. Cecilia showed our Board members
how the Deaf children expressed themselves with SignWriting. THANK YOU,
CECILIA, FOR YOUR OUTSTANDING PRESENTATION! And congratulations too,
for your major accomplishment in 2002 ;-)

At the end of our meeting we discussed another project....Captioning
ASL videos with written ASL in SignWriting". Board member James Short
is an expert in bilingual captioning of English and Spanish, and has
offered to create an experimental video captioning ASL in ASL. Just as
hearing people read English captions, while listening to English
programs, it will be fairly simple to caption ASL with ASL, since there
is no translation involved. Such an experiment could lead to
specially-developed software to ease the process of captioning with
SignWriting...Thank you, James, for offering to create this highly
unique video, which could be downloaded from the web someday, if we
succeed!

Here is a photograph of those who attended the meeting. From left to
right back row: James Lucas, James Short, Kristi Short, Anne Goldman,
Denise Tierney, and Paul Sutton. From left to right, bottom row: Conrad
Hanson, Doris Sutton, Cecilia Flood and Valerie Sutton. HAPPY 2003!

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