Are you on social media?

We don't have our own accounts but project team members are using #O5S5ASL to tag relevant content. Feel free to tag yours too if you're talking about your experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic and you consider yourself a member of the ASL communities.

Where will you be sharing the videos you collect?

We are using YouTube to share video data. It will be a bit slow-going because we want to make sure all of our content is captioned. We will also be depositing all of the videos and metadata (information about participants, project and annotated files) in an online repository after the project's completion.

How can we cite your work?

Thanks for asking! You can cite our project as:

Hochgesang, J.A., Bates, M., Clark, A., Davis, K., Dunham, M., Hamilton, L., Kadar, S., Kim, Y., Martínez Castiblanco, J. A., Maucere, G., Newman, T., & Simmons, H.. (2021). O5S5: Documenting the experiences of the ASL Communities in the time of COVID-19 (Version 2). figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.16983517.v2

Can I get access to your annotated files?

We currently are using our working archives stored on Google Drive to store our project documentation. If you wish to access our annotated files (which are ELAN annotation files using the ASL Signbank as an ECV), please contact lead researcher at julie dot hochgesang at gallaudet dot edu

How can I participate?

Thank you for your interest! We are seeking short (3-5 minute) narratives from self-identified members of the ASL communities and you can sign up for that here.

Or if you have anything you already made, you can share that with us too! Email us at FieldMethodsGU at gallaudet dot edu.

Where are you getting your photos for the ASL signs on this page?

We are using our own project videos or photos from the ASL Signbank.

What are the right signs for "pandemic", "coronavirus", "vaccine", "mask", etc?

Great question. We are linguists who are interested in describing what the communities actually do so we're not here to determine what's "right" or "wrong". Also, we love how language use varies across the communities, hence our use of "ASL communities, and celebrate that variation. We don't think any variant is inherently better than others and will represent all variants that come up in our stories. But, over time, communities do tend to prefer a specific variant which becomes more commonly used. At the time of writing (November 2021), it appears these variants are most commonly preferred (but, remember, we are not endorsing them nor saying they're "right"!).