[sw-l] using SignWriting to index Stokoe's dictionary

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
April 6, 2005

On Apr 6, 2005, at 1:26 PM, Kimberley A. Shaw wrote:
> I'm off to tackle the Stokoe-index project now, and am admiring the way
> these SignPuddle signs cut-and-paste into Word for the PC. It will be
> interesting to see how much overlap there is between Stokoe &
> SignPuddle
> ... or not!

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How exciting, Kimberley! Thanks for being so positive and energetic!

By the way, you were correct that when you searched for all of the C
hand signs, that not all of them came up in the SignSearch mode...They
will, however, if you search the old fashion way by words...

I talked with our programmer, Stephen, about it...He is in the process
of doing a wonderful upgrade to the whole SignPuddle site, and many of
these problems will be solved in a few months...

But specific to the problem you found, Kimberley...there is an easy
explanation. Most of the SignPuddles from other countries have new
signs that were just entered in the past two months, so they have no
trouble searching....but the older dictionaries, such as the ASL one,
started first, and they have signs that were entered as only
graphics...out of the 3416 signs in the ASL dictionary, only around 300
of them were entered recently...The recent ones are being done with
SWML, but the older ones are only dumb graphics files that do not have
all the information stored to be able to search on them...Stephen and I
were talking about, today, maybe throwing out all the old graphics
signs, and just leaving the 300 or so that can really be
sign-searched...if we do that, we have a big job to re-enter all those
3100 signs again, but at least people like yourself could find
everything you need then...and there will be no more frustrations...

Val ;-)