MSW:International Corpus

3. International Corpus
From education to research, from entertainment to religion, SignWriting is useful because people are writing.

3.A. Historical
Since it's beginnings in 1974, SignWriting has always been a practical script that has been used by real people writing real text. What started in one country has spread around the world.

Dating from 1986 till today, there is an extensive set of documents for SignWriter Dos (and other editors) from multiple countries around the world.

3.B. Modern
Since 2004, an international corpus has been building. It has undergone several symbol set updates. It has grown from comma delimited data, to XML, and finally to formal words. Each conversion has enabled the international corpus to grow and evolve. Along the way, data from previous historical formats has been reentered into the corpus.

In 2012, the international corpus has hundreds of thousands of signs from dozens of different languages.

The quality of the corpus is inconsistent. There are many spelling mistakes and older forms of writing. This body of work isn't the end, but the start of something more. As more people learn to write and develop their own style, the quality of the corpus will naturally improve.