Building the British Sign Language Corpus
Temas
Detalles
This paper presents an overview of the British Sign Language Corpus Project—the first endeavor to create a machine-readable digital corpus of British Sign Language (BSL) collected from deaf signers across the United Kingdom. In the field of sign language studies,it represents a unique combination of methodology from variationist sociolinguistics andcorpus linguistics. Unlike previous large-scale sign language sociolinguistic projects, thedataset is being annotated and tagged using ELAN software, given metadata descriptions,and the video data has been made accessible, with long-term efforts to make the datasetsearchable on-line. This means, however, that participants must consent to having thevideo data of their sign language use made public. This puts at risk the authenticity of the linguistic data collected, as signers may monitor their production more carefully thanusual. We discuss our attempt to minimize this problem by creating a dual-access archive.