SignWriting presentation today in San Diego

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
May 31, 2007

Dear SW List!
I just got back from my presentation of a Private WebPuddle to a  
research group. It was a two hour presentation to 10 researchers and  
their questions were great...

When I arrived they had SignPuddle on the web, projected large onto a  
screen, and one of the researchers worked the computer while I stood  
by the screen and pointed out how to do things...There were two  
excellent interpreters and I felt very fortunate!

We created several signs together and then we searched for signs by  
symbol and by symbol-frequency and by signs and by words...

We had a long discussion on how we sort (alphabetize) dictionaries by  
Sign-Symbol-Sequence...and what worked best for finding signs in  
dictionaries?...was it handshape-movement-location?...or was it  
handshape-location-movement that worked the best? and so forth...very  
interesting...

One of the Deaf researchers was curious about writing signs under the  
hips, like the sign for Newfoundland, and Russia...so we wrote the  
sign for Newfoundland together..

Another researcher was fascinated by the fact that if you write the  
word HOW in the translate program, you will get many many versions of  
the sign for HOW in ASL listed there...she wanted to know why it  
wasn't more standardized? smile...so we all discussed the issues of  
dialect, writing styles, signing styles, spelling standardizations,  
and the fact that some of them were actually different signs...

And they use FileMaker Pro 8.0 for their other data collections, so  
we discussed the use of SignBank 8.5 to do some sophisticated  
searches...I promised them I would try to experiment with some of the  
searches that they need..like all the signs that include the nose and  
the index finger...combination searches is what they need, and then  
they need to print out the vocabulary list they get when they do the  
search...

Between SignBank and SignPuddle I believe everything could be done  
that they requested...

So this will be ongoing work and from time to time I hope we will  
hear if our software is useful to them...I will assume it will be...

The Private WebPuddles are great for small research groups that need  
private data but are not yet ready to use a full separate server...

Private WebPuddles
http://www.suttonshop.com/ecommerce/pages/products_sw_detail.jsp?id=50.0

We have three groups that are using private Web Puddles now ...

Anyway - I really enjoyed getting out of the house and seeing old  
friends and presenting SignPuddle to them...

Thank you, Steve, for SignPuddle!

Val ;-)