Generations in the DGS Corpus: Evolving Outreach Activities and Cross-Generational Stories on Social Media in a Long-Term Corpus Project

Abstract

Social media has become a powerful tool for research projects, community outreach, science communication, and to recruit participants. Due to its differences to traditional media and presentation modes, it provides a particular focus on producing very concise content that is entertaining and accessible while staying informative. In this paper, we describe how the long-term project DGS-Korpus, creators of a corpus and dictionary of German Sign Language, evolved its outreach strategies over time. One unique aspect of its unusually long project run-time of nineteen years is that it has involved several cases of multiple family members participating in the project at different points in time, resulting in cross-generational participation. The paper describes how the project’s social media campaign uses these cross-generational connections to illustrate important aspects of the project, such as its relevance for cultural heritage and language identity, the different ways that members of the German deaf community were and are involved in the project, and its relevance to interpersonal connections.