BSL Corpus Project

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.

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.

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!