BSL Corpus Project

The BSL Corpus Project has now filmed 128 participants. We have now finished filming all 30 participants in Glasgow, Birmingham and Bristol. A big thank you to Bristol fieldworker Carolyn Nabarro for all her fantastic work as fieldworker for the project!

The BSL Corpus Project team would like to welcome our new staff members: Research Associate Jordan Fenlon, Greater London fieldworker Hamish Cooke (he has replaced the very busy Mark Nelson). Also we would like to welcome our new Greater Cardiff Deaf community fieldworker Jeff Brattan-Wilson who will work in the Cardiff area.

The BSL Corpus Project has a new PhD student Rosemary Stamp. She is researching sociolinguistic variation and change in BSL with evidence from the BSL Corpus data.

We welcome them all to our growing BSL Corpus Project team.

Jordan is Deaf from a large British Deaf family. He was research associate on the BSL Corpus Project from January 2009 until June 2011, and is currently working as a lecturer at Gallaudet University. Jordan took over from Sally as data collection co-ordinator, but was also responsible for annotation and analysis, working with Ramas Rentelis. He received his PhD from UCL in 2010. His thesis examined the production and perception of visual markers to boundaries in signed languages. His research interests inlcude the linguistics of signed languages, corpus-based approaches to sign language research, sociolinguistic variation in signed language and sign language prosody and how it is similar to and different from audio-visual prosody.

In 2008, Rose graduated from the University of Wolverhampton with a degree in Deaf studies and linguistics, completing her dissertation on verb agreement across sign languages. Following this, she joined DCAL as part of a four-year funded masters and PhD studentship in association with the BSL Corpus Project. As part of her studentship, her MRes dissertation looked at number sign variation in BSL. She is now undertaking her PhD focusing on sociolinguistic variation and change in the BSL lexicon.

Greater London fieldworker (2009)

Mischa comes from a Deaf family and is an active member of the Deaf community. She loves to travel and attends deaf events all over the UK, meeting new deaf people. She used to work for ‘The Vibe’ and ‘See Hear’ as a reporter occasionally in her teenager years. She currently works part-time for the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre (DCAL) as a Deaf Community Liaison Officer. She was asked to temporarily step in as Greater London fieldworker, before Melinda Napier took over the role.