Moving Heads and Moving Hands: Developing a Digital Corpus of Irish Sign Language: The 'Signs of Ireland (original) (raw)

2006, … Project'. Paper presented …

This paper outlines the establishment of the first digital corpus of Irish Sign Language using a software programme called ELAN. The Signs of Ireland comprises 40 signers making it the largest digital annotated corpus of a signed language in Europe. This paper describes the way in which such software enhances sign linguistic research, and outlines some of the limitations that arise, in great part, because of the lack of a standardized notation system for signed languages, because of the need for human consistency when working on annotation, and the fact that you will 'get out what you put in' when working with a digital corpus: that is, the decisions made regarding the annotations influence analysis results.