Ordering Signs in Dictionaries

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
August 18, 2014

OK. Rather than reading all of your messages, that are important, on this topic, let me at least share my personal experiences with sorting, and then of course go ahead with new ideas…I am very interested in new ideas...because my work on sorting by Sign-Symbols and SignSpellings happened back in the early 2000s, so a lot has transpired since…and technology continues to race forward - which is exciting I think…

First, let me point you to some old documents…

SignBank Dictionaries
http://signbank.org/dictionaries/

and go to Number 3  and Number 5 on that web page:

Number 3: ASL-English Picture Dictionary
http://www.signwriting.org/archive/docs2/sw0111-US-PictDict-ASL-Eng.pdf

Number 5: ASL-English Dictionary
http://www.signwriting.org/archive/docs2/sw0113-US-ASL-English-Dict.pdf

Both these documents are small dictionaries sorted by the system I developed, which is established in SignBank 2002 software. I asked a FileMaker programmer named Todd Duell to help me develop a dictionary-maker for SignWriting in FileMaker, and the result was SignBank 2002. It was a database that had the capability to create PDFs of dictionaries sorted by what I called at the time “Sutton’s Sign-Symbol-Sequence”.

Years later, when I met Steve Slevinski, Steve also implemented this theory in his software, SignPuddle. SignPuddle Online is different and popular, and gives us other opportunities that the old SignBank 2002 could never give us. Later we imported signs from SignPuddle Online into SignBank, and that can be done again if I do some work on the old program SignBank. SignBank needs to be updated to ISWA 2010 - so there is some work on the old program, but it would be valuable to have it again because the old SignBank had printing and sorting capabilities for SignWriting dictionaries that are rather cool ;-)

I think if Charles had had a SignBank database that could import the signs written in SignPuddle or SignWriter Studio, and then sort and print dictionary documents either to PDF, or print on a real printing machine, he probably would not be doing everything by hand - sorry Charles that our software always has to catch up with you!

I will write more later - and I will explain the reasoning behind how the above two documents were sorted -

Val ;-)

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On Aug 18, 2014, at 4:39 AM, Jonathan Duncan <duncanjonathan at YAHOO.CA> wrote:

> On 8/15/2014 11:49 AM, Valerie Sutton wrote:
>> SignWriting List
>> August 15, 2014
>> 
>> Hello Jonathan, Charles, Steve, Adam and André, and everyone -
>> 
>> Thank you for your many messages - I have to go back and read every message carefully about the SignSpelling and sorting, because there are so many details to ponder and then I will tell you some of my personal experiences sorting dictionaries…including before SignPuddle, back in 2002, when Todd Duell, a Filemaker database designer, and myself, designed SignBank 2002 - it was a database that produced PDFs of dictionaries sorted by Sign-Symbols - we learned a lot from that experience and it may or may not be useful to you - but I can at least share it with you and you can take it or leave it ;-)
> Hi Val,
>     Yes I would really enjoy your input and your experience with producing the PDF dictionaries.
> 
> Regards,
> Jonathan


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