Report on 1st European SignWriters Symposium.

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
August 23, 2005

On Aug 23, 2005, at 6:26 AM, Barbara Pennacchi wrote:
> SW Computer/Technology Group:
> It initially started as a lesson by Daniel Noelpp on how to use  
> SignWriter DOS to write down signs, since it shares a lot of  
> features with SW Java and SW Tiger. But the lesson soon became a  
> discussion in itself, since there were some participants that  
> didn't know SW at all, while others already knew bot SW and SW-DOS.  
> After the short afternoon break, those participants joined the  
> abovesaid sub-group to learn more about SW itself, so the remaining  
> people continued discussing on where and how is going software  
> development for SW in the near future... (I, Barbara, must admit  
> that I might have been a bit monomaniac on the problem of using SW  
> software for Sign Language research purposes :p)

Ha! You know this is a good point. We oftentimes get so caught up  
with the computer software development itself, that we forget about  
the fact that SignWriting started by hand...back in 1974 there were  
no, or at least few, desktop computers in people's homes...so I never  
even thought of computers when we first wrote Danish signs back in  
1974...and we were using it for research at the University of  
Copenhagen, and so for the final publications of their research, the  
SignWriting was written nicely by hand with an ink pen! It worked  
fine for small documents ;-))

so I think we can get obsessed with technology and actually avoid  
learning SignWriting...so Juliette teaching by hand is great, I think!

But meanwhile I want to thank Daniel Noelpp and Lars Majewski and  
others, for presenting their software development at the Symposium!

And good software will always be needed for larger documents and big  
dictionaries...

Val ;-)