Hello My name is Valerie Sutton and I
have a question from a viewer. They want
to know about my early publications in
SignWriting, or “What were the early
books that were in SignWriting or
teaching SignWriting?”
It's a very good question but
boy, it's a big answer, because SignWriting
is going to be 50 years old in
2024 and in these 50 years there have
been a great many publications. Thank
goodness. We are very blessed to have
those
publications. When I first started
writing sign languages at the University
of Copenhagen in
1974, I was specifically writing Danish
Sign
Language and so we have a
few documents from that time. So if
you're asking what the early
publications were, the word “early” is
the problem because those early research
documents were very much research and
until I started working with deaf people
and had teams of beautiful native
signers working with me in the
1980s, I personally was not a signer, so
it looked like a researcher who was
trying to publish sign language written
because, at that time, I was a dancer and
I had
invented a Movement Writing system and
for me, I was “observing” movement. I was
looking at a stage of dancers, or other
people doing movement, and I was writing
what I saw, and I saw people facing me. So
and also when you write on video you
know you're looking at somebody facing
you. So I was writing what I saw on video
that I was given by researchers at the
University of Copenhagen. So in the
beginning in the 70s, the SignWriting
Publications were all what they call
“Receptive”. We were facing the person on
the page and the the writing was facing
us, like there was a person standing in
front of us, and then in the
1980s, after we were done with um uh the
1970s, and we started working on the
SignWriter Newspaper as you know and we
distributed that to the world and the
Danish School System started using
SignWriting because of the SignWriter
Newspaper, we went from writing Receptive,
where we were facing the reader, and the
writer, and into doing what we call
“Expressive” because we had a
big meeting of our DAC staff in the
1980s. They were distressed because they
found out that they wanted to write
Expressively so the writing system
changed. So that changed all of our
publications. So to answer your question,
“What were our early publications like?”
They were all Receptively written and
they were based on videos and they
looked a little bit more like 
DanceWriting from the waist up. It was
like we were writing
signs in relationship to Movement
Writing rather than to the feelings of
the deaf people themselves, who after all
are writing their own language now. So
when I handed the Deaf Community the
SignWriting tools and just said write
with it… apply it to your language… uh
some of them demanded a meeting with me
to say we want to change to Expressive
please, where we “feel” what we write and
we're writing from our own perspective
so we see our own hands and we're not
facing a person. We are the person
expressing ourselves. We're facing
ourselves. We can feel ourselves. So even
facial expressions were not something in
front of you. They were things that you
were feeling on the face that change to
Expressive was one of the biggest events
we had because every single textbook we
had, had to be changed from Receptive to
Expressive. So when you ask “What about
those new publications in 1970?” Well, we
had uh the Danish Deaf sentences from
the research project in a book and there
was writing of a deaf person on a
South Pacific Island in a book and there
were other beautiful DanceWriting books
that came out in the
1970s, and the research project at the
University of Copenhagen, where I had
been exploring writing hearing persons
gestures, and then in the 1980s, when I
started teaching the school system in
Denmark, the books that came out there
were all Danish Sign Language and they
were also facing us in Receptive
but by 1984, so in the middle from 1982
to 1988, when we were working with the
Danish School System, right in the middle
there in 1984, is when we changed over to
Expressive and it was a big change for
everybody. So the SignWriting system
went through a major evolution and that
was good and the result was a whole
series of new publications that came out.
There is the SignWriting Basics
Instruction Manual. There is the Lessons
in SignWriting Textbook which started
in 1990 and went on for years, changed
forever. It just got its newest version
in
2023 um as an eBook which is outstanding
and we also have uh the Handshapes of
“The international SignWriting Alphabet
ISWA 2010” got recorded in books so what I'm
trying to say is that as SignWriting
evolved the books
evolved and so to ask what the earliest
books are, is more uh an exploration of
our history than to say what should we
use now? What do you want to use? Well I
would suggest some of these books over
here and look at a beautiful one from
Brazil back there. I think I know who did
that. So I'd like to thank you all for
asking about the books, but I would like
to point out that as the SignWriting
system evolved, so did the books evolve,
and what you need to learn today is with
the most recent up-to-date books because
the very early books were more like
Movement Writing, looking at sign
languages for the first time and just
learning how to skill our viewpoints to
understand what's important to deaf
people and the language that they
love