Chapter 7. Exploring regional variation in the DGS Corpus

The DGS Corpus was collected in order to document German Sign Language (DGS) for linguistic research, compile the corpus-based dictionary DW-DGS and provide a cultural resource for the language community. Regional aspects played a key role in participant selection, data collection tasks and procedures, as well as in annotation work. Regional granularity implemented had to be a compromise between research interests, corpus size, and privacy issues of participants. In the lexicographic work maps are used to visualize regional distribution of single signs as well as of groups of competing synonyms. Maps are a tool for data exploration, and they support data interpretation as well as quality assurance of the annotation. As they provide an intuitive access to distributional facts maps are also an important element in the dictionary.