Linguistics Colloquium Speaker: Julie Hochgesang

The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Julie Hochgesang, Professor at Gallaudet University.   Dr. Hochgesang will present on "Sharing ASL data online FAIRly with CARE the ASL way - MoLo and O5S5 projects".

As a deaf linguist in North America, my recent work has been the documentation of the language use of the ASL communities in North America. In my presentation, I discuss how language documenters share their data publicly, drawing upon Austin Principles of Data Citation, FAIR and CARE guidelines and practices specific to signed language researchers. I also present findings from a recent survey we did with the ASL communities about sharing ASL data online.

I focus on two current documentation projects - “Motivated Look at Indicating Verbs in ASL (MoLo)” and “Documenting the experiences of the ASL communities in the time of COVID-19 (O5S5)” which I am working on sharing as open access. While I describe the projects and showcase some of the data, I specifically highlight the data statements I am creating for both of them and reflect on what it means to publicly share ASL videos online.

Julie. A. Hochgesang (/ˈhoʊkˌsæŋ/) is a professor of Linguistics at Gallaudet University. She is a deaf* linguist who specializes in phonetics and phonology of signed languages, fieldwork, documentation, and corpora of signed languages, and ethics of working with signed language communities. Professor Hochgesang also works towards making linguistics accessible to the communities, especially the ASL communities, sharing multimodal products via social media and digital repositories.  She has contributed to ongoing efforts to create accessible collections for the ASL communities, most notably as active maintainer of the ASL Signbank. Her most recent ASL documentation projects include the "Philadelphia Signs Project". “Motivated Look at Indicating Verbs in ASL (MoLo)”, “Gallaudet University Documentation of ASL (GUDA)”, and “Documenting the Experiences of the ASL communities in the time of COVID-19 (O5S5 - ASL name derived from ASL variants for “Document COVID”). The work she does is because of the ASL communities and she considers herself a member of these communities.

ASL/English interpretation will be provided.

Funded in part by the GPSAFC and Open to the Graduate Community.