Linguistics Professor Dr. Julie Hochgesang has just published her book, ASL Signbank through Cambridge University Press’ Cambridge Elements (Sign Language Series). Readers can experience the online version for free until July 3rd.
Here, take a peek into Hochgesang’s intellectual and personal labor of love, which centers Deaf signers in creating and documenting language.
What is your book about?
It’s about ASL Signbank, a digital tool that stores data such as American Sign Language (ASL) videos, photos, and text, all connected with individual ASL signs for the purpose of annotating ASL videos. from what ASL Signbank is to why it exists and how to use it.
ASL Signbank was entirely made with signers in mind. There are plenty of resources out there for ASL learners, very few for those who already use them as their daily primary language.
Since creating a database requires many choices and ongoing labor, the book is also a reflection on these choices.
What’s your history with this project?
I’ve been thinking about how to represent ASL video data since I started graduate school in 2005, and have been working on ASL Signbank properly since 2015. And I’m still thinking about all of this. ASL Signbank is an old friend of mine. In its various incarnations, it has kept me company for many years. We’ve grappled with many issues together.
Why did you start ASL Signbank and what is it?
Language documentation of the ASL communities is essential to preserve and share our language use and interaction, something we cherish. Yet there is no conventionalized written system that can be used, instead we’ve been using video. Currently these videos are mostly not accessible in a way we can search the contents for language expressions.
ASL Signbank is an online database that maintains ID glosses for ASL. It’s like a password manager storing those passwords that are hard to remember. A signbank is an online lexical database for a signed language, usually developed by linguists working with signed language corpora or those who are interested in modeling some aspect of language. Starting with the signed language of the Australian Deaf community, signbanks have been created for several signed languages, including British Sign Language (BSL) and Nederlandse Gebarentaal (NGT).
It’s also a celebration of variation in ASL. We all sign in our own ways that reflect the lives we’ve lived and our socioidentities. We try to serve the representation of that.
Readers may notice ASL Signbank doesn’t read like a traditional academic text. It’s more accessible. Can you explain your choices?
As will be clear in the book, I don’t see myself as a traditional academic. As I thought about how to write it, I found myself thinking what do readers want me to say? What is the “right” way to do this, but then I realized that’s not what I can write about. I’m a Deaf ASL community member trained in linguistics. I see the beauty and importance of practices and feel the shapes of things better as I do them, as I interact with them and reflect on the process. That’s what I write about.
This Element will not be a “traditional academic” product, a decision I have made precisely because I question the label “traditional academic.” It will be what I would have liked to see when I was a young scholar. It’s for deaf people. It’s for people who don’t see themselves as traditional academics but have the knowledge although they haven’t seen themselves as having authority for constructing and sharing that knowledge.
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