[Sw-l] Collaborative Writing, Group Writing

Valerie Sutton sutton at SIGNWRITING.ORG
Tue Apr 26 17:15:39 UTC 2022


SignWriting List
April 26, 2022

Hello SignWriting List, and John Carlson,

It is very interesting for me to read your messages. And I will follow your dreams…

You know about programming concepts I have never heard of, and because I'm not a programmer, I have never thought of such things. So thank you for sharing your ideas and I hope that others who are programmers can collaborate with you.

The old profession of “movement notation”, which goes back 100s of years, and there are many systems (I compiled a little booklet with examples of other dance notation systems if someone is interested), is a profession that has changed now because of computers.

Back when I was working with Sutton Movement Writing in Denmark in the early 1970s, everything was written by hand, or with wax transfer sheets that I developed that presses wax symbols on a paper, because personal computers weren't developed yet … see attached


So I actually never thought of the idea of a typewriter for Movement Writing until the mid-1980s. So I am a writer, not a programmer…. but I can certainly share your dreams for a future with cool software as you suggest, John ;-)

So what is the profession of a “movement notator”? Movement notators are not choregraphers.

The word choreographer refers to someone who creates new dances for other people to dance, but they are not the "movement notators" who write down the choreography. Movement notators write “sheet dance” or “dance scores”, so people putting on a production together, have a document to refer to… I used to hand the written dance scores to the dancers who had to perform the choreography on stage, and they were learning the dances from the score behind the scenes, before they went on… this happened because the Boston ballet dancers that were performing were late and learned the dances from the score… it was a Bournonville production I produced in the 1970s in Boston… and the guest dancers were running from stage to stage - I really don’t know what we would  have done if we hadn’t had the written DanceWriting - 

So I am not promoting anyone moving in any way - I am not creating dances - I am just writing dance scores… when I write DanceWriting - and it has been years! But I found a whole bunch of beautiful handwritten documents by my DW students from the 1970s the other day, and some were Scottish Folk Dance which has some similarities to the Virginia Reel -

...and I see that Sutthikhun has already written some, so let me look at the next messages …

More soon..

Val ;-)

-----------

> On Apr 23, 2022, at 1:04 PM, John Carlson <yottzumm at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> I came up with this from several directions.  In 1991, I came up with the idea of writing a movement programming language, but it was a solitary activity.  In 1997, I heard about “pair programming.”  Since 1985-1986, I had been interested in multiuser environments, like text chat, and later making multiuser environments for planning systems, visual programming, solitaire games, and mesh editing.
> 
> In 2019, I became interested in SignWriting, etc. and wrote a very simplistic translator from English to SignWriting.  I also became familiar with Natural Semantic Metalanguage.
> 
> For a while I had been exploring the idea of generators in computer science and also emitters.   I then arrived at collectors, the opposite of emitters.
> 
> Back in the late 80’s a friend recommended “Godel Escher Bach” by Hofstadter.
> 
> I became fascinated with differential set theory, continuous hierarchy and smooth collections,  cumulating in waves of concepts and fields of concepts.
> 
> A friend Doug Sanden said he had explored crowds as emitters/collectors.
> 
> I remembered fluid concepts from another Hofstadter book.
> 
> Before those two, and back into the 70s with the book “beyond competition” I became interested in collaborative games, like puzzles and “house.”
> 
> So plugging this all together, I came up with a “dance of concepts.”  Which seems like what Valerie has been pushing for a long time.  Dance is collaborative.  I remember doing the Virginia Reel in physical education in school.  I don’t know if I could attempt to do the reel in DanceWriting, but it would be fun to try to convert video to DanceWriting.
> 
> I wrote the start of a collaborative environment for teaching people and computers the rules to card games.
> 
> I realize that indeed this may only be a “field of dreams”, but I imagine one could do holodeck programming with holoconcepts.
> 
> I will look for a Virginia Reel or other square dancing videos.
> 
> On Sat, Apr 23, 2022 at 2:24 PM Valerie Sutton <sutton at signwriting.org> wrote:
> SignWriting List
> April 23, 2022
> 
> Thank you, John, for this question about “Collaborative Writing”… I bet we can write it. Tell us more about what you mean… what is a “collaborative activity” to you?
> 
> Do you have any videos we could write together?
> 
> Val ;-)
> 
> -------
> 
> 
> > On Apr 23, 2022, at 5:31 AM, John Carlson <yottzumm at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> > 
> > I’m wondering how SignWriting, DanceWriting or MovementWriting might be done in collaboration, or used to describe collaborative activities.
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > 
> > John
> > ________________________________________________


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