ECHO stands for European Cultural Heritage Online. It was a European project initiated by the Max Planck Society (and in particular the MPI for the History of Science in Berlin) in Germany in 2003 as one of the earliest projects in this century that aimed to use modern technology to archive data from the arts and humanities and make materials accessible online. Subsequent projects that focus more on language include DARIAH, CLARIN and FlaReNet.
ECHO did not particularly select language data as a domain, but included history of science, music, and archeology. One of the five case studies in ECHO was devoted to signed languages, for which new data were collected (rather than historical materials made accessible).
The home page of the sign language case study in ECHO is still being maintained, and new data are still welcome in the archive that was created. The archive itself is accessible online as part of the online corpora of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
A basic lexicon, five fable stories, and some poetry and other narratives were recorded for three signed languages: BSL, NGT, and SSL. Some of the fable story data have been reused as elicitation material for the Corpus NGT and the BSL Corpus. The fable story recordings of two signers each received rich annotations in ELAN. Both movies and annotations are freely available for research and teaching.
In addition to the three languages mentioned above, the full video of the Gehörlos So! corpus of DGS was digitised and added. The annotations for two of the ten segments that were published by Signum Verlag in 2001 are available as ELAN documents.
Home page of the central ECHO project: echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
Home page of the sign language case study
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