The project Sign Language Acquisition, Annotation, Archiving and Sharing (SLAAASh) is a model for working with diverse ASL Deaf communities in all stages of the project. In this presentation, I highlight key steps in achieving this level of collaboration. First, I discuss the importance of sharing work with the community—a key form of reciprocity recognized by Deaf community members. Second, I discuss the importance of reflecting diversity, e.g., ensuring that ASL Signbank actors vary in age, gender, ethnicity, body type, and language experience. Third, I discuss the importance of incorporating feedback from stakeholders and show how the ASL Signbank actors have expressed different views that have impacted our development of the Signbank. Finally, I discuss the crucial component of building substantive community connections and maintaining them long-term. I end by discussing our own efforts to build community connections to date as well as planned future ones.
Keywords
Language documentation and long-term accessibility for sign language data
Julie A. Hochgesang. 2018. SLAAASh and the ASL Deaf Communities (or “so many gifs!”). In Proceedings of the LREC2018 8th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Involving the Language Community, pages 63–68, Miyazaki, Japan. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
BibTeX Export
@inproceedings{hochgesang:18049:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Hochgesang, Julie A.},
title = {{SLAAASh} and the {ASL} Deaf Communities (or ``so many gifs!'')},
pages = {63--68},
editor = {Bono, Mayumi and Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Hochgesang, Julie A. and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna and Osugi, Yutaka},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2018} 8th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Involving the Language Community},
maintitle = {11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2018)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Miyazaki, Japan},
day = {12},
month = may,
year = {2018},
isbn = {979-10-95546-01-6},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/18049.pdf}
}
