The Signs of Ireland corpus is part of the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences’ “Languages of Ireland” project. The first of its kind in Ireland, it comprises 40 male and female signers from across the Republic of Ireland, aged 18-65+, all of whom were educated in a school for the Deaf. The object was to create a snapshot of how ISL is used by ‘real’ signers across geographic, gendered and generational boundaries, all of which have been indicated as sociolinguistically relevant for ISL (cf. the work of Le Master; also see Leeson and Grehan 2004, Leonard 2005, Leeson et al. 2006). With the aim of maximising the potential of cross-linguistic comparability, we mirrored aspects of data collection on other corpora collected to date. Thus, we include the Volterra et al. picture elicitation task (1984), “The Frog Story”, and also asked informants to tell a self-selected story from their own life. To date, all of the self-selected stories have been annotated using ELAN. Two institutions (CDS, TCD and ITB) have partnered to create a unique elearning environment based on MOODLE as the learning management system. This delivers third level signed language programmes to a student constituency in a way that resolves problems of time, geography and access, maximizing multi-functional uses of the corpus across programmes. Students can take courseware synchronously and asynchronously. We have now built a considerable digital asset and plan to re-architect our framework to avail of current best practice in digital repositories and digital learning objects vis-à-vis Irish Sign Language. This paper outlines the establishment and annotation of the corpus, and the success of the corpus to date in supporting curricula and research. This paper focuses on moving the corpus forward as an asset to develop digital teaching objects. This paper outlines the challenges inherent in this process, and outlines our plans and our progress to date in meeting these objectives. Specific issues include:
Decisions regarding annotation
Establishing mark-up standards
Use of the Signs of Ireland corpus in elearning/ blended learning contexts
Leveraging a corpus within digital learning objects
Architecture of a digital repository to support sign language learning
Tagging of learning objects versus language objects
Issues of assessment in an elearning context
References Lorraine Leeson, John Saeed, Cormac Leonard, Alison Macduff and Deirdre Byrne-Dunne 2006: Moving Heads and Moving Hands: Developing a Digital Corpus of Irish Sign Language: The ‘Signs of Ireland’ Corpus Development Project. Paper presented at the IT&T conference, Carlow, 2006. Leeson, L. and C. Grehan 2004: To the Lexicon and Beyond: The Effect of Gender on Variation in Irish Sign Language. In M. Van Herreweghe and M. Vermeerbergen (eds.): To The Lexicon and Beyond: The Sociolinguistics of European Sign Languages. Gallaudet University Press. 39-73. Le Master, B. 1990: The Maintenance and Loss of Female and Male Signs in the Dublin Deaf Community. PhD Dissertation. Los Angeles: University of California. Le Master,B. 2002: What Difference Does Difference Make? Negotiating Gender and Generation in Irish Sign Language. In S. Benor, M. Rose, D. Sharma and Q. Shang (eds.): Gendered Practices in Language. Centre for the Study of Languages and Information Publication. Stanford. Leonard, C. 2005: Signs of Diversity: Use and Recognition of Gendered Signs among Young Irish Deaf People. Deaf Worlds, Vol. 21 (2) 62-77. Volterra, V., S. Laudanna, E. Corazza and F. Natale 1984: Italian Sign Language: The Order of Elements in the Declarative Sentence. In F. Lonke (ed.) Recent Research on European Sign Languages. Svets and Zeitlinger: Lisse. 19- 48.
@inproceedings{leeson:08004:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Leeson, Lorraine and Nolan, Brian},
title = {Digital Deployment of the Signs of {Ireland} Corpus in Elearning},
pages = {112--122},
editor = {Crasborn, Onno and Efthimiou, Eleni and Hanke, Thomas and Thoutenhoofd, Ernst D. and Zwitserlood, Inge},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2008} 3rd Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Construction and Exploitation of Sign Language Corpora},
maintitle = {6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2008)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Marrakech, Morocco},
day = {1},
month = jun,
year = {2008},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/08004.pdf}
}