BSL Corpus Project

Some of the first results from the BSL Corpus Project have been published in the March 2010 issue of the ‘British Deaf News’, in an article by BSL Corpus Project PhD student Rose Stamp, Adam Schembri, Jordan Fenlon and BSL Corpus Project co-investigator Bencie Woll. If you’d like to read the article, you can download it from this link here.

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.

A short article about the BSL Corpus Project, and a mini-lecture by Adam Schembri on sign language, appeared on the University College London webpage recently: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1001/10011803 .

We have now filmed 237 people across the UK, and are aiming for a final target of 250 participants. Jordan is currently working in Wales with our new Cardiff Deaf Community fieldworker, Sarah Lawrence, filming the last group of Welsh participants. Sarah has stepped up to take Jeff Brattan-Wilson’s place as the local fieldworker - welcome Sarah!

The BSL Corpus Project team been joined by a new DCAL Deaf intern - Breish Rowe. Breish is a psychology graduate from the University of Durham who has joined DCAL for one year. She’ll be working on a number of DCAL projects, including the BSL Corpus Project. Welcome Breish! Jordan Fenlon, our project research associate, passed his PhD viva recently, so congratulations to Dr Fenlon! Our research assistant on the project, Ramas Rentelis, has passed his University of Durham Postgraduate Diploma in Interpreting with the Deaf Community with a distinction: congratulations Ramas! Finally, our project-linked research student, Rose Stamp, successfully completed her Masters in Research degree here at UCL, with a dissertation focussing on variation and change in BSL: congratulations to Rose!

It’s been a few months since the last update, but progress with the filming has been excellent: we have now filmed 214 Deaf people for the project. Thanks very much to Evelyn McFarland in Belfast and Jordan who finished filming in Belfast in September. Jordan also worked with Jeff Brattan-Wilson in Cardiff to film 20 participants there in October. Unfortunately, due to other work commitments, Jeff is not able to continue in his role as Cardiff Deaf Community Fieldworker, so we take this opportunity to say a big thank you to Jeff and to Evelyn for all their wonderful work with us on the project.

The team would like to welcome three new Deaf community fieldworkers to the BSL Corpus project: Belfast fieldworker Evelyn McFarland, Newcastle fieldworker Dawn Marshall and Greater London fieldworker Melinda Napier. Melinda Napier has replaced Hamish Cooke. The BSL Corpus team would like to thank Hamish for all his hard work.

Kyra Pollitt has accepted the role of BSL Corpus Project translator/researcher. She and her colleagues at The Pollitt Bureau will be responsible for a written English translation of some of the BSL Corpus Project sign language data.

We would like to welcome Evelyn, Dawn, Melinda and Kyra to the team and we are looking forward to working with them!

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.