Chapter 11. W(h)ither the ASL corpus?

Abstract

In this chapter, we discuss logistic and ideological practices used by signed language corpus projects around the world to develop their corpora, starting with Johnston’s early call to develop signed language corpora in 2004. We then outline a brief history of existing American Sign Language (ASL) corpora or corpus-like collections, most of which are specialized and/or inaccessible. We unpack the lessons we have learned as we, North American linguists interested in signed language research and corpora, have sought to create a national-level corpus following the standards set by earlier projects. We conclude that our contexts are somewhat different, and describe projects that we think would be better suited for our ASL communities. In other words, though our dreams of having a single national-level ASL corpus have ‘withered’, we remain optimistic that corpus methods can be used to catalog and analyze the wealth of ASL signing data currently available.