signwriting symposium presentation 31: digital collaboration with machine-readable sign language...
DESCRIPTION
Presented Live Online July 24, 2014 on Google Hangouts and YouTube. Go to the SignWriting YouTube Channel: http://www.YouTube.com/SignWriting. Visit the SignWriting Symposium Presentation 31 web page to read abstracts and papers, and watch videos and slides by Stephen Slevinski: signwriting.org/symposium/presentation0031.html ABSTRACT Digital collaboration with machine-readable sign language text in the SignWriting Script There are primarily 2 types of natural languages for humans: spoken and signed. A spoken language relies on a sequentially ordered list of sounds. A sign language relies on 3 dimensional space with simultaneous action. If we imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge, this ideal relies on targeting each person's primary language. This dream is incomplete when sign languages are not included. The SignWriting Script is an international standard for writing sign languages by hand or with computers. From education to research, from entertainment to religion, SignWriting has proven useful because people are using it to write signed languages. Initially created in 1974, the SignWriting Script has matured and spread around the world. Today, SignWriting is used in dozens of countries and able to write any sign language. The symbol set has been stable since 2010 and the machine-readable encoding has been stable since the beginning of 2012. The developers of SignWriting support open content. While the name SignWriting is trademarked, the script itself is free to use for anyone in the world. The fonts are available under the Open Font License. The documentation is available under creative commons. The machine-readable encoding is covered in an Internet Draft submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force: draft-slevinski-signwriting-text. The SignWriting Script is available to use on Wikimedia Incubator. The American Sign Language Wikipedia has 50 articles. Other sign languages are primed to start. The technical infrastructure is maturing nicely and widespread adoption continues to increase. It is the dream of sign language writers to share in all of the benefits of the spoken language users who so easily share and collaborate in an international world. This presentation will cover the history, today's reality, and tomorrow's dream for written sign language using the SignWriting Script.TRANSCRIPT
Digital collaboration with machine-readable sign
language text in the SignWriting script
in association with the Center for Sutton Movement Writing
presented by Stephen E Slevinski Jr
SignWriting Symposium 2014 Day 4, time marker 25:55
http://www.signwriting.org/symposium/presentation0031.html
SignWriting open data around the
world.
The diversity of SignPuddle Online
1 million signs
65 sign languages
2 years of stability
http://signbank.org/signpuddle3.0/en/world/
Digital Collaboration
in the SignWriting Script
Imagine a world in which every single
human being can freely share in the sum of all
knowledge.
WikimaniaLondon 2014
August 8th-10th
1. Wikimedia
2. Sign Language Reality
3. Standards Process
4. Collaboration
5. State of the Art
Presentation Outline
Digital Collaboration
in the SignWriting Script
Wikimedia
Wikimedia is a global movement whose mission is
to bring free educational
content to the world.
WikimediaWikimedia Labs
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Nova_Resource:Signwriting
http://swis.wmflabs.org/
http://ase.wikipedia.wmflabs.org/
WikimediaWikimedia Incubator
https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Slevinski/SignWriting/Tech
http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/ase
Coexists with spoken language throughout time
Egypt and Ancient Greece
Martha’s Vineyard
Sign language is superior in many situations
Deaf communication
Infant communication
Spatial description
Places where sound is not reliable
The sign language reality
Grammatically correct
Digital collaboration
International community
Handwriting styles
Completeness of SignWriting
The standards process
Sharing experience and perspectives
Building on the works of others
Documenting the results
Working together
The standards process
A long digression into how standards are made…
The standards process
http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html
Dive into HTML5 by Mark Pilgrim
Specification
ImplementationsReal world usage
Implementations and specifications have to do a delicate dance together. You don’t want implementations to happen before the specification is finished, because people start depending on the details of implementations and that constrains the specification. However, you also don’t want the specification to be finished before there are implementations and author experience with those implementations, because you need the feedback. There is unavoidable tension here, but we just have to muddle on through.
The standards process
Mozilla Developer
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2010Jan/0107.html
40 years of history
30 years of computer encoding
7 years of iterative development
Heuristic model that is compact and tractable
2 years of stability
SignWriting’s Standings
The standards process
Text, not video
Individual signs
Content
Tools
Collaboration
ASCII encoding - Formal SignWriting
SVG fonts
CSS integration
Regular expression searching
Available on Wikimedia Incubator
Digital collaboration and open data
SignWriting Today
The state of the art
Editors for desktop and mobile
TrueType Font
Standards Integration
Written sign language: universally available
SignWriting Tomorrow
The state of the art
Imagine a world in which every sign
language user can freely share in the sum
of all knowledge.
SignWriting Symposium2014
July 21st - 24th
40 Presentations from 12 Countries
http://www.signwriting.org/symposium/2014