Signed enumeration of ribbon tableaux

We give an extension of the classical Schensted correspondence to the case of ribbon tableaux, where ribbons are allowed to be of different sizes. This is done by extending Fomin's growth diagram approach of the classical correspondence between permutations and pairs of standard tableaux of the same shape, in particular by allowing signs in the enumeration. As an application we give a combinatorial proof for the column sums of the character table of the symmetric group.