Dr. Evan Hibbard was in the process of completing his PhD thesis in American Sign Language (ASL) using videos accompanied by written English sections when he brought me abroad. It was going to be the first of its kind at Ryerson University, and would be published on TerpTube for deaf people. I was tasked with putting together all the footage with graphics into chapters for the thesis in preparation for his defense.
It was my first foray into working on content for academic purposes, so I was quite honoured to have this opportunity in supporting Dr. Hibbard. It took several months and I have tremendous respect for researchers, because the process is painstaking and stressful, having seen it first hand now.
One of the challenges included keeping all the videos and graphical assets organized with text for captions. All graphics and charts were provided by Dr. Hibbard to be added to specific parts of each chapter with figure captions created by me. For captioning, Dr. Hibbard opted to have me caption the ASL videos based on the English text in his thesis. Open captions were chosen due to the varying video platforms the videos were being hosted on.
Here’s a link to an article titled “PhD thesis opens new doors for deaf scholars” with Dr. Hibbard by Zack Bradley at University Affairs published 17 November, 2015.
