🚀 go-pugleaf

More discussion on the ASL project was mistakenly send as email instead
of posted... Here it is.

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From: Sherman Wilcox <wilcox@hydra.unm.edu>
To: clouds@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu
Subject: Re: Interactive videodisc project--American Sign Language
Newsgroups: comp.ivideodisc
In-Reply-To: <40067@ut-emx.uucp>
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Cc: 

In article <40067@ut-emx.uucp> you write:
>(This is Kathy talking now...) What are the radicals of an ASL word?
>Gesture? Direction? Hand shape? Distance? Position near body? 
>
In the work of William Stokoe that I mentioned, he identified what
have come to be called the parameters of an ASL word (the equivalent,
I think, of what you are calling the radicals): handshape, movement,
and location. I fourth parameter was later proposed by other linguists,
hand (palm) orientation.

Stokoe developed a writing system for ASL based on these parameters.
More recently, a writing system called "SignFont" was developed by
Emerson & Stern (the same folks that I've seen mentioned lately doing
development on speech recognition systems for Mac). The E&S system uses four
parameters too: handshape, movement, location, and what they called 
"action area."

We plan to use any & all of these systems in coding ASL words for retriebval
in the ASL Hypermedia Dictionary. We hope that one of the advantages of
building in hooks to a relational database is that we will be able to
have multiple or redundant codings. This will allow us to have only citation
forms on the real-estate-poor videodisks, but store codings in the real-estate
rich database for variant forms (words signed or "pronounced" slightly
differently, for example).

And now, a question for anyone out there who might be reading this. I keep
hearing that we will soon have the technology to do a project like this on
CD-ROM. Does anyone have any idea approximately how much full-motion video
we can expect to store on a CD-ROM? I realize this depends on many things
(as I understand it, picture size, frames per second, compression factors,
etc). Any ballpark figures?

Sherman Wilcox
Dept. of Linguistics
University of New Mexico

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About CD-ROM: it's my understanding that a videodisc holds about 3.5 gigabytes
of information, and a CD-ROM about 0.6 gigs. Can anyone confirm or dispute
these figures? My grey matter is notoriously unreliable...

--K

-- 
...........................................................................
:   Kathy Strong               :  "Try our Hubble-Rita: just one shot,     :
:  (Clouds moving slowly)      :   and everything's blurry"                :
:   clouds@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu  :                           --El Arroyo     :
:..........................................................................: