BSL Corpus Project

The BSL Corpus Project final report to the Economic and Social Research Council is now available. The final report provides a project overview, summarises the methodology and major findings, and early and anticipated impacts within academia and the community.

The BSL Corpus Project (Jan 2008 - June 2011) would not have been possible without the BSLCP team or the BSLCP participants. Thank you!!

Starting in January 2011, Dr. Adam Schembri has taken up a new post as the Director of the National Institute for Deaf Studies at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia. The team wishes him the best of luck! Adam will stay on as a Co-Investigator on the project and so will continue to be involved. Kearsy Cormier will act as director of the project until June.

We are delighted to announce that the ESRC have granted the BSL Corpus Project a 6-month extension until 30 June 2011. This will enable us to continue our important work on sociolinguistic variation in BSL for a few months more.

Jordan Fenlon and Robert Adam (DCAL) received £12,000 from UCL’s Beacon Bursary for the DCAL Roadshow. The roadshow will visit the following cities: Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Manchester, and Newcastle. These events will run for one afternoon each time and will feature a series of lectures delivered in BSL by hearing and deaf researchers at DCAL, including BSL Corpus Project staff and students. The aim is to provide each local community the opportunity to learn about different areas of sign language research and the chance to put questions to the researchers themselves. The first event will take place in Birmingham on the 19^th March with the remaining five events taking place over the following months. For more information click here.

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!