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.

Steady progress has been made since the summer.  We have carried out filming sessions in Birmingham, London and Manchester.  So far 60 people have been filmed.  The good news is that Birmingham area has now been completed, and we continue to film in London and Manchester.  We would like to thank our fieldworkers in these areas for their hard work.  This month, we will start filming in Glasgow and Bristol.  Watch this space!

BSL Corpus Project director, Adam Schembri, made it onto the cover of the October issue of the British Deaf News magazine, produced by the British Deaf Association. This photo was taken during his presentation at the British Deaf Association conference in Cardiff in August.

We’ve fallen a little behind in sharing news with you all, but we are delighted to announce that Avril Hepner  accepted the position of Glasgow Deaf community fieldworker for the project back in August and has been working with us since then. We plan to have our first filming sessions in Glasgow with Avril in November - a belated welcome to the team, Avril!

Adam Schembri, Mark Nelson and Sally Reynolds conducted the first pilot data collection session on July 11 here at DCAL in London. We were very grateful for assistance from Tanya Denmark and Jordan Fenlon, two BSL native signers and PhD students at University College London who agreed to act as participants for the pilot filming session. We’re now ready to begin filming sessions in London, Manchester and Birmingham.

We are pleased to announce that Carolyn Nabarro has accepted the position of Bristol Deaf community fieldworker for the project - welcome to the team, Carolyn, we look forward to working with you in the near future.