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

[Kimberley A. Shaw]

sw-l at majordomo.valenciacc.edu on Wednesday, April 06, 2005 at 4:52 PM
-0500 wrote:
>How exciting, Kimberley! Thanks for being so positive and energetic!

If I bite off more than I can chew, *will* let you know. From a look at
the Stokoe index, there is, indeed, a lot of overlap, but I think that
there will be some good additions to SignPuddle as well! Will double-check
with my ASL-fluent buddies before submitting any SW from-Stokoe
transcriptions, just to make sure I've got'em right.
>
>
>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...

Sorry Val -- doesn't help when I don't know what the words are!!
>
>
>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...

More power to the whole signwriting team!
>
>
>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...

Nice to know some of the history here.

>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...

NoNoNoNoNo please do not do that!
Would it be too labor-intensive to do a one-at-a-time rolling update from
old-graphic to new-format instead?
Am now cut-&-pasting together my own ASL-English dictionary. Can you tell
that I'm a little worried about keeping up with my ASL now that my class
is about to go on a two-month break??
Best,
Kim
>
>
>Val ;-)
>
>