At the 5. Cultural Days of the Deaf (Kulturtage) in Erfurt (20.-22. Sept. 2012) the DGS Corpus Project participated with a stall showing several posters about the progress of work and presenting some exemplary material of the elicited material and other signed texts in 3D. Visitors were especially interested in a poster showing more than 220 informants that had participated in our data collection.

Visitors could try out for themselves a prototype of automatic sign recognition: signs signed into a 3D camera (Kinect) are recognized automatically by a special computer program and reproduced by an Avatar. This technology is still in development and will be useful for accessing electronic dictionaries. To improve the stability of the system we need more data, for example a certain number of signs signed by many different persons. These data are used to train and improve the system. In Erfurt over 30 people volunteered and have been filmed for this purpose at the DGS Corpus stall.

We developed a preliminary test-version of our planned online feedback and conducted a test run with 30 participants at the Kulturtage. This was done to see whether the questions asked and the material shown (signs and examples) can be understood and how the participants react to them. On average a test run lasted about 25 minutes. The test runs were recorded on film. The evaluation of the test runs will help to improve the questions and to develop a feedback system that will be used to get feedback from the language community on 1500-2500 signs that will be put on our homepage in the near future. The results of the feedback on signs will be used for the preperation of a basic vocabulary of DGS which is to be published in 2014. We hope that as many people as possible will participate in the online feedback.