LING BING: Primary Data

LING BING Home LING BING Primary Data CARD Home

BACK TO TOP

Primary Data - the videos from LING BING

Project Tasks:

The LING BING research team used a variety of ethnographic and sociolinguistic methods to facilitate data collection, including interviews, guest lectures, filming department events, and vocabulary elicitation and acceptability judgment tasks. The team adopted a linguistic ethnographic approach in which they more closely explored "multi-layered thick data" - interactions while considering their contexts - places, participants and their identities, settings, semiotic repertoire, and ideologies (Kusters and Hou 2020, Kusters et al 2020, Moriarty 2020). This was facilitated by documentation methods such as video recording, collection of already-existing data (e.g., YouTube videos that are publicly available), annotation, participant metadata, field materials, and field notes.

Interviews: Semi-structured interviews were conducted both in-person and virtually to elicit information about participants' experiences and perceptions of the department.
Guest Lectures: Several guest lecturers were invited to participate in Field Methods classes, and with their permission, these meetings have been recorded.
Publicly Available Videos: The team gathered various videos from public sources, such as YouTube, that pertain to the history of the GU Linguistics Department.
ASL/Written English Narratives: Some participants were not available for a full interview, but still wanted to contribute their stories and experiences to the project. These participants had the opportunity to submit videos of their ASL narratives or written English narratives.
Ethnographic Observations: Each researcher kept their own ethnographic field notes as part of the research process.
Documents: Documents that record part of the Linguistic department’s history were added to the project’s data for future use. Some examples included but are not limited to: faculty bios posted on the Gallaudet Linguistics Department website, course descriptions, syllabi, timelines created by the team from information collected in interviews, etc.

Participants provided their informed consent in writing, and often their preferences were later confirmed during the LING BING interviews or via email communication. A significant aspect of this process focused on their comfort levels with their data and likenesses being shared for use in future studies and analysis as a project under CARD. We have included only videos for which we have permission to share openly. We embed and link to each video below, but please note that there is more metadata that can be found in the YouTube descriptions, which are only viewable on the YouTube website. Again, not all videos from our project are listed here - only the ones that gave permission to share their data publicly as part of CARD.

Videos and transcripts are linked here individually as they are processed. The videos are being shared via YouTube and IDA@Gallaudet (our institutional repository), and the transcripts via OSF. Transcripts are in varying states of completion. Currently, most of them have minimal information.

We are so thankful to our participants for trusting us with their stories. As caretakers of these stories, we have a responsibility to care for the data. With that in mind, we follow CARE and FAIR guidelines, which are philosophies for taking care of digital data, and we value making the data accessible and open to ASL communities in line with their preferences. We also acknowledge, respect, and celebrate different language experiences - there is no one right way to use language.

LING BING Interviews

LING BING Guest Lectures

LING BING Public Videos

LING BING Narratives

LING BING Documents

Open access and citing

We ask you to please treat each participant's contribution with respect and care. All of our videos are open access, which means they can be publicly viewed and shared. They are licensed as CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which means you may share and adapt them, but they may not be used for profit and may only be used with credit to our project. . You can cite our project as a whole or see specific citation information under each video. We love this tech tip for sharing specific moments in videos. Because we do not have access to a digital repository that meets our needs, we are currently using YouTube to share our videos, but hope to deposit them in a more sustainable digital location in the future.

Please cite the project as a whole as:

Hochgesang, J. A., Balzarini, K., Ivanov, A., Piriz, K., Saenz, S. J., & Shi, G. (2025). LING BING: Documenting Experiences in the Gallaudet Linguistics Department. OSF TBD

Please cite the collection of publicly available videos and transcripts as:
Hochgesang, J. A. (2025). LING BING: Documenting Experiences in the Gallaudet Linguistics Department Dataset. OSF. Date. OSF. TBD

Metadata

With each video, you'll find some metadata to give you more context about that video. For example, our filenames may look funny, but they're actually quite informative - they follow this format:

YYMMDD_ParticipantInitials_LingBing_SessionID_DataType_ViewType_ Version.FileExtension

For example: 251009_RL_LingBing_S039_IV_M_V01.mov

YYMMDD is the date of recording, with two digits for the year, month, and day (e.g., 251009 means October 10, 2025). Each session was tagged with a unique identifier, or session ID, which starts with an "S" followed by a three-digit number. Data types include Interviews (IV), ASL Narrative Videos (AN), Written English Narratives (EN), Guest Lectures (GL), Publicly Available Videos (PV), and Documents (DC). View Type is a label for each video file to indicate which of the multiple cameras (or Zoom views) the file belongs to. Version refers to the order of videos within the session, used when recording needed to be stopped and restarted.

We provide a bit of metadata within each video description on YouTube, such as contributor name and visual descriptions, which sometimes include preferred social identity descriptors. All of these have been provided by the participants themselves. We are also working to provide English translations and ID glossing (which uses the ASL Signbank) transcripts for each video. The English translations are available as captions in the video and in our ELAN transcripts (.eafs). The ID glosses, which are sign-by-sign English labels to make the video machine-readable, are only available in our ELAN transcripts (.eafs). You need to download the ELAN program to open .eafs, but you can also right-click and open them as text-only files to read them in their XML format. Please note that our transcripts are still under development.

To read more about how we process our data, see here.

LING BING Interviews

1) Participant Semi-Structured Interviews:

Although the interviewers came prepared with a list of questions to choose from, the interviews were semi-structured, and depending on the interests, stories, and answers provided by participants, the flow of the interview was modified by the interviewer in real time. Participants were typically asked questions regarding their backgrounds, their connection to the linguistics department, their research and job experience, memories of professors and classes, and about any memorable stories or anecdotes. Participants were also asked about their perceptions of the department and how those perceptions might have changed over time, as well as aspects of the Gallaudet environment that made their experience unique. Lastly, participants were also asked if they had any advice for future researchers. A full list of the questions that the interviewers selected from can be found here.

2) Lexical Variation Elicitation Task:

Interviewees participated in a lexical elicitation task in which they were asked about how they signed some linguistically specific vocabulary. Some of the vocabulary terms elicited are listed here, but not limited to: Quals (Qualifying Exams), VIVA (or equivalent exams), depiction, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, construal, iconicity, Chomsky, and others. A full list of all possible elicited vocabulary items can be found here.

Each session had a single interviewee, with two LING BING team members serving as interviewer, facilitating the interview, and technician, managing the technology. Each session started with an introduction to the team and a confirmation of their informed consent, followed by an opportunity to share personal narratives, engage in free conversation, respond to various prompts, complete a vocabulary elicitation, and then close with a final check-in. The interviewer and technician were both on video with the participants at the beginning, but then the technician turned off their video until the end of the interview.

Please note we have alternate angles of these videos, one of which frames the participant for a clear, head-on view of their signing. Please reach out to us if you would like access to these videos.

To cite this video:
LING BING. 250924_JAH_LingBing_S001_IV_W_V01. YouTube, uploaded by Steve J. Saenz, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUMcIQqQbf0, [link to OSF pending]