Our stories : experiences of Ukrainian deaf people leaving Ukraine in 2022 and coming to Germany

This multimodal corpus is a collection of video recordings of face-to-face conversations in Ukrainian Sign Language by Deaf Ukrainian Refugees who left Ukraine after 2022 and came to Germany. At the moment 6 dialogue conversations of 40-60 minutes were recorded at the University of Cologne in June-September 2022, in total ca. 3 hours of data. The participants were Deaf native signers who came from Kiev, Charkiw, Odessa and Brjansk. All pairs were well acquainted participants. The participants were allowed to talk about any topic they wanted. The conversations cover a rage of topics (e.g. their life in Ukraine before and after the war; how they left Ukraine, their first experience in Germany, the Deaf lives in Ukraine and Germany). The language material was captured in optimal conditions using frontal view HD camera with green background. At the moment the corpus contains data from 7 participants (mean age 47 years old). 6 of them were born deaf, 1 signer was hard of hearing. The video recordings will be accompanied with ELAN transcriptions and annotations with a focus on discourse organization and conversational interaction and with particular attention to manual and nonmanual signals (such as head nods, head shake, eye gaze, eye blinks, mouth gesture, nose wrinkles, face expressions, eyebrow and lip movement). The data has been elicited for the purposes of conducting the project “Gestures or Signs? Comparing Manual and Non-manual Constructions Sharing the Same Form in Co-speech Gesture and Sign Language: A Corpus-driven Approach” funded by DGF under the priority programme ViCom. As the project is aimed at comparing constructions of bodily movements that take the same form in languages belonging to different modalities, the annotations focus on alignments between speech and (non)manual gesture.