Expanding the SignDNA Archive

Archive maintenance

The funds helped with the fundamentals of the archive: paying for the digital overheads. This including hosting costs, updating some of the code to avoid bugs and inefficiencies, licencing plug-ins, and video players. We expect this amount that the archive costs to increase in 2022, mainly due to increased server hosting fees, and other new costs (such as monthly newsletters to subscribers wanting to receive newsletters directly from SignDNA instead of relying on Facebook, catering to our older Deaf community members).

A much-requested feature was also added to the online archive, the addition of ‘Related Videos’, allowing viewers to being offered a selection of videos associated in some way with their current viewing choice. This required both updates to the code and many hours of work going through the individual videos again and updating the tags and connections to ensure that the selection algorithm resulted in satisfactory options. We are pleased to be able to provide this much-requested feature; one which we know will be immensely useful for viewers.

Material processing

A total of 25 videos, as agreed, have been added to the archive during this phase. Those videos represent a wide variety of contexts within our Deaf community, with videos selected from location, year, people, and event. The addition of new videos has resulted in a new category, ‘LIFE STORIES’ being added to SignDNA’s umbrella 13 categories (COMMUNITY EVENTS, DEAF CLUBS, DEAF EDUCATION, DEAF ORGANISATIONS, DEAF SPORTS, DEAF YOUTH, DOCUMENTARY/TV, INTERPRETING, LIFE STORIES, MAORI DEAF, SIGN LANGUAGE, STORYTELLING/PERFORMANCE, TECHNOLOGY, OTHER).

SignDNA has engaged with Deaf Clubs, encouraging them to begin processing their own materials, and to apply for their own funding with SignDNA’s support. While SignDNA has taken care of the digitisation of video materials, this is a good opportunity for Deaf community organisations and individuals to start processing their own materials, with SignDNA’s support when required. This is the first step in creating a broader infrastructure of community engagement around the archive and we hope will lead to greater recognition of the archive in the future.

Please note, that SignDNA was also thrilled, after years of collaboration, to confirm late last year that the St Dominic's Catholic Deaf Centre in Palmerston North has donated their full collection of St Dominic's video footage to SignDNA, along with hundreds of documents and photos. SignDNA is working on a plan on how to process these items, and we look forward to making them accessible online to the Deaf community. SignDNA is grateful to the Catholic Deaf leadership and David Loving-Molloy for their support in taking steps to make their invaluable materials available to the Deaf community.

Community engagement

Community engagement with the archive continues to grow, and in the opening weeks of this year alone (2022), SignDNA’s videos have received 4,000 views on our website – 1,000 unique views (showing a good number of return visitors). Those numbers do not include individual views on Facebook nor the number of shares each video generates. We are pleased to be attracting such numbers and believe that this provides clear evidence of the strength of community support for SignDNA, and its reality as an essential visual archive for the New Zealand Deaf community.

The ‘community engagement’ component of the project was to collect unique NZSL stories from Deaf individuals complementing the videos on the archive. SignDNA is thrilled to confirm that we have collected over 50 unique NZSL stories, from 10 Deaf individuals, with an average of 5 stories per person, up to 3-4 minutes long). Those stories, now being processed, are envisaged to complement the current NZSL videos on the archive, to provide more content and context to the events within. They can be thought of as an enriched NZSL version of English ‘comments’. What is clear is that our target group for story sharing, older Deaf people, are yet to have the capacity to be able to film themselves comfortably, and to upload their content online directly to SignDNA; a skill that younger Deaf New Zealanders do not have an issue with! Those videos will be added in due course, now that a ‘Stories’ section has been added to the archive: 

We realise that proactively collecting stories from the community, especially those directly related to naturally occurring videos collected, is the best approach at this time, and this is an area that SignDNA would love to expand in the near future. Time waits for no one and as members of the Deaf community pass away, we all lose their valuable stories and experiences along with them. While we do have a collection of life stories, there is still a need to actively seek Deaf community members’ contributions to individual videos, enriching that particular video item (and therefore the overall archive for the Deaf community).