When? October 10-11 2024
Where? Universitat Pompeu Fabra
On October 10th and 11th a group of sign language and gesture researchers from different labs met at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) to discuss annotation systems and possible guidelines for annotating non-manual elements such as the head, the eye(brows), and the torso. The idea for this informal meeting arose from discussions at the DGfS in Bochum earlier this year to bring together sign and gesture researchers and discuss annotation standards across disciplines. The three ViCom projects Iconic Metaphors and the Gesture-sign Interface in German Sign Language – Corpus Data Meet Experiments (IMaGeS), Exploring the Limits of Simultaneity: Encoding Caused Change-of-state Events with Classifier Constructions in German Sign Language (DGS), and Co-speech Gestures and Prosody as
Multimodal Markers of Information Structure were involved in the organisation.
After discussing existing annotation schemes for manual and non-manual articulators, the group in Barcelona split into smaller teams that each focused on a subset of articulators and went over one current proposal for annotation guidelines put together by the SignLab Amsterdam. Lively discussions ensued and revealed that while there’s overlap between gesture and sign language annotation needs and systems, we need more exchange and discussion to fine-tune an annotation scheme we can all agree upon. In the upcoming years, further exchanges will take place, inviting input from all interested experts and labs from both the gesture and the sign language research communities.
Photos by Cornelia Loos