BSL Corpus Project

Filming in Glasgow was completed this week - Sally worked with Avril Hepner and successfully filmed 30 Deaf participants there, with the last session taking place last Tuesday. Glasgow now joins Birmingham as the two cities where data collection for the BSL Corpus Project is complete. A big thank you to Avril and Jenny for all their fantastic work as fieldworkers for the project!

The website for the Corpus NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands Corpus) was officially launched on December 12: video clips of the data are ready to be viewed. Congratulations to our Dutch colleagues Onno, Inge and Johan!

Annotating the BSL Corpus Project video data for studies of sociolinguistic variation and change has begun: we have started to move film clips into ELAN files so that we can begin to analyse the data. Here is a screen shot of an ELAN file showing a conversation between two Scottish BSL users. We have begun analysis of a phonological feature in this data, using special codes to record the features we are interested in (we’re keeping the details confidential for now, until all data collection is complete - we don’t want information about our research to influence the signing used by participants we will film in the future). As far as we know, we’re the first research team to use ELAN for studies of sociolinguistic variation in sign language phonology in this way (the Sociolinguistic Variation in New Zealand Sign Language Project pioneered the use of ELAN for variation studies of NZSL grammar and the use of fingerspelling). For more information about ELAN, visit the website for the software, where it can be downloaded for free.

Ramas Rentelis has started a new part-time position with the BSL Corpus Project as a research assistant. Ramas will be responsible for capturing the video data to computer, editing and annotating the data for the sociolinguistic variation and change projects. Welcome Ramas - we’re looking forward to working with you! You can read about more about Ramas on the team page.

As of December, 2008, we have now filmed 80 Deaf participants: 30 in Birmingham, 20 in Manchester, 14 in London and 16 in Glasgow. We will be filming again in Glasgow this month, and in Bristol in January. As Jacqueline Parker’s baby is due very soon (thanks for all your hard work as a Deaf community fieldworker on the project, Jackie!), we have taken a break from filming in Manchester for now, but we will be back in mid 2009 to film an additional 10 people there. We look forward to working with Jackie again next year.