Do you have any criteria about the provenance of the handwriting samples? I teach a linguistic anthropology course at Oberlin about Literacies. I spend one week teaching them about SW and having them produce short texts - we are having that class meeting later this month. These are hearing students who generally know little about sign languages - I introduce them to SW to help expand their notion of what can be written. Sometimes I ask them to write a simple ASL sample, but sometimes I have them write co-speech gestures. Would texts like these - produced by total novices, not necessarily of a SL - be useful? Because if so, I'm happy to share the batches I generate each time I teach this course. But I can imagine they might not be what you're looking for :) Best, Erika On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 12:13 PM, Fabrizio Borgia <[log in to unmask] > wrote: > Dear All, > I'd like to take a moment to explain the work of my team (Université > Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier, Computer Science Department - "Sapienza" > University of Rome) in the latest few years. > We are working at a *Optical Glyph Recogition* (OGR) engine for > SignWriting. > > Well, OGR sounds very much like OCR (which is Optical Character > Recognition) because they both share the same goal: *the conversion of > images of text into characters*. In the OGR case, the characters are the > glyphs. > Apart from the goal, OGR and OCR have very little in common. The design > and the implementation of our application is somewhat different from the > standard OCR design, because we are facing different problems, and > different datasets. > > We know that there's a huge amount of handwritten SW corpora, scattered > around the world, and we believe that they carry an invaluable knowledge, > both for the Deaf Community, and for the Research Community. Our goal is to > make them digital, to *empower their diffusion*, and to *ensure a > long-lasting existence* for them. > > After a very, very thorough design phase, we are developing the OGR > application (and, in confidence, we are about halfway to go) and *soon we > will release a footage showing our software in action*. > > To make our OGR stronger, we need to test it with diffrent datasets (SW > texts, pages, etc.) we need your help, dear SW list! > *We need any kind of handwritten SW texts, in any digital image format. > > * > *Optionally, we'd like them to be: > * > > - *written in columns* > - *whithout any segmentation (annotation lines, squares, etc.) from > one sign to the following one > * > > Anyone can send us some material (even spare pages will DEFINITLEY do) or > point us in the right direction? > Thanks in advance for your time, from Rome! > > -- > Fabrizio Borgia, M.D. > > Ph.D. Student > Sapienza - Università di Roma > Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier > > O&M SW Engineering Intern > SERCO S.p.A. > > [log in to unmask] > [log in to unmask] > [log in to unmask] > ________________________________________________ > > SIGNWRITING LIST INFORMATION > > Valerie Sutton SignWriting List moderator [log in to unmask] > > Post Messages to the SignWriting List: [log in to unmask] > > SignWriting List Archives & Home Page > http://www.signwriting.org/forums/swlist > > Join, Leave or Change How You Receive SW List Messages > http://listserv.valenciacollege.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=SW-L&A=1 > > -- Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway Assistant Professor of Anthropology Oberlin College ________________________________________________ SIGNWRITING LIST INFORMATION Valerie Sutton SignWriting List moderator [log in to unmask] Post Messages to the SignWriting List: [log in to unmask] SignWriting List Archives & Home Page http://www.signwriting.org/forums/swlist Join, Leave or Change How You Receive SW List Messages http://listserv.valenciacollege.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=SW-L&A=1