Norwegian Sign Language (henceforth NTS for Norsk TegnSpråk) is one of the known yet little described signed languages in Europe. Since 1825 it has been school language in Norway at schools for the deaf. As early as 1875 Norwegian Sign Language was labelled as a language (Skavlan, 1875), but as in many other western countries this attitude towards a signed language didn’t survive the period of oralism and first in the late 1970s, early 1980s the idea of NTS as a natural full-fledged grammatical language evolved again. Through the past 3 decades several official documents and articles, (e.g Bergh 2004; Erlenkamp 2007; Erlenkamp et al. 2007) have operated with a number of about 4000- 5000 deaf Norwegians and an unknown number of hearing Norwegians using NTS as one of their first languages. It is estimated that about 15.000 of the 4.5 million Norwegians use this language as a first or second language. Thus, it is a rather small language community. By now, NTS has gained a relatively wide acceptance in the Norwegian Society and April 28th 2009 a proposition was passed by the Norwegian Parliament that NTS should become one of several official languages (Stortingsmelding 35 (2007/2008). Sign language studies and interpreting studies have been offered at several Universities and University Colleges since the mid-1990s. Moreover, in the 1990s the government established a 40 weeks free course in NTS for hearing parents of deaf children to help closing the gap between the hearing parent’s signed language knowledge and skills and the practical skills of their deaf children in NTS. Thus, the need for documentation of the NTS in a corpus based dictionary has been evident to the field for quite a while. However, the documentation of Norwegian Sign Language has so far only been conducted by a handful of researchers and thus little research has been done on NTS. Furthermore, despite some high quality applications to raise funding for corpus work the field has not succeeded to gain enough understanding in governmental research funding institutions for the need of the small population of NTS users for a language corpus and a corpus based dictionary. Today there is only a non-corpus based dictionary project to collect signs in a kind of general sign glossary. As a result the field is trying out a new approach by involving the NTS community to create a larger database of signs, including their use, distribution and probably other metadata. The project aims at using a Wiki user interface, with integrated functions for use of videos where each article covers a sign with the opportunity to comment on and contribute meta-information about the sign. Like Wikipedia, the SignWiki will be open accessible, but administered by a group of experts. This form of data collection leads to some advantages in terms of being user based, but also a number of risks regarding the reliability and quality of the data. These issues will be discussed in the presentation. Since the project just secured funding for the next two years and still is in an early stage, there is no wiki to present yet. Instead the presentation aims at presenting the challenges and tasks in developing the wiki, like:
developing a user interface based on a common Wiki that allows to integrate videos and demand little experience in using the video tool
developing a standard for each article (each article will be linked to one sign), including slots for metadata about the usage of the sign and opportunities for discussion of the sign by users
informing and encouraging the NTS community to partake in this project
This project is above all an attempt to involve signers in a project about their own language and gather some information of signs based on user knowledge. As a consequence, the expectations on what can be collected and the level of quality of each article have to be kept on a reasonable level. It is, however, planned to make the signs from the already existing glossary available on the wiki as well, in an attempt to obtain more information about these signs and thus hopefully to create a synergy effect between the SignWiki and dictionary project. Obviously a SignWiki cannot replace a scientific corpus. But if this experiment is successful it might be a good starting point for countries with no or little funding of corpus projects were the involvement of users is the key factor.
@inproceedings{erlenkamp:12015:sign-lang:lrec,
author = {Erlenkamp, Sonja and Eriksen, Olle},
title = {{SignWiki} -- an experiment in creating a user-based corpus},
pages = {45--48},
editor = {Crasborn, Onno and Efthimiou, Eleni and Fotinea, Stavroula-Evita and Hanke, Thomas and Kristoffersen, Jette and Mesch, Johanna},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {LREC2012} 5th Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages: Interactions between Corpus and Lexicon},
maintitle = {8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC} 2012)},
publisher = {{European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}},
address = {Istanbul, Turkey},
day = {27},
month = may,
year = {2012},
language = {english},
url = {https://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/lrec/pub/12015.pdf}
}