BSL Corpus Project

Phase 1 of data collection for the BSL Corpus Project is now complete!

We have filmed an amazing 249 Deaf people from London, Bristol, Cardiff, Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Belfast and Glasgow, which is a record number of participants recorded in a single sign language corpus project. Each of these participants were filmed telling personal experience stories, engaged in a conversation with another participant, answering interview responses and producing their signs for 100 vocabulary items. All the BSL Corpus Project team would like to thank Jordan Fenlon and Sally Reynolds for leading on the data collection: well done to you both on getting this mammoth task completed! Jordan and Sally’s job would have been impossible without the work of our Deaf community fieldworkers: Jenny Wilkins, Jacqueline Parker, Carolyn Nabarro, Mark Nelson, Mischa Cooke, Melinda Napier, Jeff Brattan-Wilson, Avril Hepner, Evelyn McFarland, Dawn Marshall, and Sarah Lawrence - a big thank you to all of you.

A big thank you to Sarah Lawrence and Jordan who successfully filmed another 10 Deaf participants in Wales last week. The total number of people filmed for the BSL Corpus Project now stands at 247, which is 7 more than our original target of 240. Later this month, we will film the last 2 pairs of London participants (i.e., 4 more participants), and filming for this phase of the project will be complete.