I do like the idea of cross-linguistic elicitation material like what you’ve suggested, though I think both those pieces are quite long – we might want to select an excerpt from one of them. (My vote is for something from Frog, Where Are You? – I like being able to look back and forth at the pictures to construct the story in my mind, since I don’t normally think in ASL. I know I’d find a picture story easier to work with than a video.)

Great idea!

KJ

From: SignWriting List: Read and Write Sign Languages [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway
Sent: Friday, January 18, 2013 1:17 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: idea for SW book

Hi all!
I've been thinking over what material we should use a shared starting point for producing SW documents for the book. I don't want to us to translate from a text in a written (signed or spoken) language. So, I'm thinking the best approach might be to an elicitation material commonly used in cross-linguistic spoken and signed language research, such as Frog, Where Are You? (a picture story with no written text) or The Pear Story video.
For those not familiar -
The former can be seen in the appendix of this article: http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/manuals/frog.pdf
The latter can be viewed here: http://pearstories.org/
I suggest one of these because they've been chosen precisely because they are thought to be relatively cross-culturally accessible - and we are a diverse group :)
They are also thought to elicit interesting grammatical variation in languages.
Finally, because there is so much research on sign languages that has used these materials for elicitation, the texts you produce can more easily become a part of a broad comparative cannon.
Frog, Where Are You? will be more work for you all though, as translating it will certainly take much longer - and for that reason The Pear Stories might be a better choice.
However, it would be really cool if another result of this project was to contribute to the written sign language literature available for d/Deaf children and other readers!
Mercer Meyer has been very generous in lending this story to research, and I can look into what it would take to make it permissible to have multilingual versions of the text with the illustrations available on the SSW website. Having the translations be useful not only for research purposes but also for kids to read would certainly be in the SW spirit!
What do you all think?
Best,
Erika

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Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Oberlin College