Minimalist

[rocha at ATLAS.UCPEL.TCHE.BR]

Valerie,

> Before you go, I want to ask you...How was the presentation in France
> in June? The one that presented transcribing video?

  Unfortunately, it happened that I was not able to attend the conference :-(

  But later I talked to many french colleagues that participated in it.
And I came to realize an interesting point: the french are mostly
interested in the representation of dialogs, not of narratives.

  That is, they are more interested in learning what are the features
needed for writing conversations between two or more people, than in
writing stories.

  It seems that in sign languages, as in oral languages, the writing of
dialogs will require special symbols and text formatting not usually
present in the writing of narratives (for instance, indication of who
has taken the turn in the dialog).

  But in sign languages, it seems that there is a special additional
requirement: since virtual objects are created in the shared signing
space, so people can refer to them during the dialogs, it seems that the
writing of dialogs require the explicit representation of such objects,
besides the representation of the two (or more) participants in the
dialog.

  I briefly tried to get a solution for that in SignWriting. I came out
with the conclusion that it is not a problem that can be solved easily
(but I confess I didn't try really hard :-)

  There was a paper by Patrice Dalle and Boris Lenseigne, presented at the
conference, that has pictures clearly illustrating the issue. It is at

    http://tals.limsi.fr/actes/s7.pdf

(the full proceedings is at http://tals.limsi.fr/actes ).

  By just looking at the dialog pictures at that paper one can understand
the issue: How can a SignWriting dialog be structured so that those
small elements representing objects and relations between them be
represented in a clear way, showing that they are all accessible to both
participants in the dialog?

  Anyway, just the point that french people are more interested in dialogs
than in story telling is an interesting point :-)

  All the best,

  Antônio Carlos

-----------------------------
Antônio Carlos da Rocha Costa
Escola de Informática - UCPel