Documenting the experiences of the ASL communities in the time of COVID-19

Conference poster presented at TISLR14 (https://www.tislr2022.jp/) Osaka, Japan (September, 2022)

This poster is a preliminary report of what a Gallaudet Field Methods class as collected as part of a project we call "O5S5: Documenting the experiences of the ASL communities in the time of COVID-19". 

Abstract: 

     

“Documenting the experiences of the ASL communities in the time of COVID-19” 

The Gallaudet University Field Methods course is currently conducting a language documentation project about the experiences of the ASL communities in the time of COVID-19, or “O5S5”. O5S5 is derived from the handshapes used in ASL variants of “document” and “covid”. Since early 2020, the world has been in a pandemic due to COVID-19 and for much of that time since, people have practiced physical distancing, masking, staying home and other measures to protect one another. As with any shift in human behavior, the pandemic has had a profound impact on all of us - from how we think about personal safety and health to how we interact with one another. There are documentation projects collecting information about living in the pandemic. For example, the MI COVID Diaries Project focuses on “documenting changes in the lives and language of Michiganders during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond”. A google search yields many projects, especially broad historical archiving projects that accept a wide range of materials related to life in the pandemic. So clearly, much is being documented by archiving projects but most probably will not include the deaf signing communities. O5S5, our documentation project, seeks to do just that. 

That is, O5S5 will document the experiences of ASL communities during the pandemic with a focus on language and communicative practices. Language documentation is basically the act of creating a multi-purpose, digital record of a set of annotated language texts and accompanying materials (field notes, participant metadata, project files, etc) (e.g., Himmelmann, 2006). Such work is done by or in conjunction with the communities, following their lead in which knowledge to record and preserve while valuing the decisions of the communities themselves rather than prioritizing any academic tradition (Dwyer, 2006; Harris et al., 2009; Leonard, 2018). We are interested in capturing the knowledge of any self-identifying member of the ASL communities - deaf, coda, hearing - regardless of the age they acquired ASL. Our project will be ethnographic and qualitative using varying data collection tasks to elicit knowledge about living during the pandemic. While we are particularly interested in the use of ASL during the pandemic (while masked, online Zoom doing what we call “emboxed discourse”, figuring out how to sign new words and phrases like “COVID-19” or “mask”), we want to record their stories about living during the pandemic. We will also consider a wider range of interactions that reflect the actual multi-modal and -lingual interactions between members of the ASL communities and others. For example, on Zoom, people could be using ASL on screen but written English and emojis in the chat. In the store, a Deaf American who prefers ASL as their primary language may gesture or use written English on their phone with the non-signing English speaker working as a cashier. We are interested in observing all of this. 

   

Our data collection includes: ethnographic observations of publicly accessible behavior (masked, emboxed, etc); interviews with individual participants both on Zoom (unmasked) and in-person (masked); group conversations of 4 participants both on Zoom (unmasked) and in-person (masked); collections of 3-5 minute narratives about COVID-19 life (in-person and masked, on zoom unmasked, and self-submitted); potentially, time-permitting, retelling story activities. We will use our data to explore language and communicative practices of the ASL communities in the time of COVID-19. We expect to see the following themes emerge from our data: 

●  Language practices while masked or emboxed (video-mediated communication)
●  Linguistic compensation strategies when masked and emboxed
●  New lexical terms or phrases (e.g., signs for mask, covid-19, pandemic, etc)
●  Ideologies about language and communicative practices
●  Shared stories about the pandemic 

We will also document our own experiences of being both researchers and participants (we too are living in a pandemic and we too are members of the ASL communities).

Our presentation will be a report of our documentation project, outlining the open-access data we have collected and shared. We will also describe how this project has centered our values: data belongs to the communities; respect for language variation and different acquisition journeys; diversity inclusion; safe space (no tolerance for derogatory terms and actions); both bilingual and bimodal (ASL/English). We will also highlight specific aspects of our data collection that tie into our expected (and likely, unexpected) thematic analysis. We hope that this project will shed light on the varying influences the pandemic has had and provide a resource to reference, reflect on, and learn from the ASL communities. 

References
Dwyer, A. M. (2006). Ethics and practicalities of cooperative fieldwork and analysis. In J. Gippert, U. Mosel, & N. Himmelmann (Eds.), Essentials of Language Documentation: A Handbook (pp. 31–66). Mouton de Gruyter.
Harris, R., Holmes, H. M., & Mertens, D. M. (2009). Research Ethics in Sign Language Communities. In Sign Language Studies (Vol. 9, Issue 2, pp. 104–131). https://doi.org/10.1353/sls.0.0011
Himmelmann, N. P. (2006). Language documentation: What is it and what is it good for? In J. Gippert, N. P. Himmelmann, & U. Mosel (Eds.), Essentials of Language Documentation (pp. 1–31). Mouton de Gruyter.
Leonard, W. Y. (2018). Reflections on (de)colonialism in language documentation. In B. McDonnell, A. L. Berez-Kroeker, & G. Holton (Eds.), Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998. Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication no. 15 (pp. 55–65). University of Hawai’i. http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/24808