Building the Deaf Experience, Deaf Expression (DXDX) Project

Abstract

This presentation introduces the Deaf Experience/Deaf Expression (DXDX) Project, a growing publicly-available collection of video interviews with deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) adults, teens, and their families. It is created as a resource for parents, educators, and health care professionals as they make decisions for young children about assistive devices, sign language, and school options. Interviews ask about social, linguistic, relational, and educational experiences to provide missing information about the effects of early choices on DHH children's quality of life. So far, 20 undergraduates have contributed to the project through a series of teams. The project's student team consists of several groups who work on different tasks for the project. These teams include recruiting and scheduling, interviewing, annotating, thematic analysis, social media, captioning, video editing, database, and presentation team.

The recruiting and scheduling team focuses on contacting individuals with hearing loss interested in participating in interviews and scheduling those interviews. The interview team conducts the interviews over zoom, lasting around an hour, completed in spoken or sign language, with an interpreter. After the interviews are conducted, the annotation team tags the interviews for specific topics. The thematic analysis team then uses these tags to locate common themes seen across the collection of interviews. The social media team works on marketing our project for potential participants and interested hearing loss communities by posting infographics and facts across different platforms. The video editing team then finds and edits clips of the interview that are then captioned and posted onto social media. The database team is currently working on creating the publicly searchable platform of video clips. The presentation team creates and presents posters and talks at local, state, and national conferences.

The DXDX video corpus is a new resource to fill a gap of information for parents and professionals about the socio-emotional effects of decisions they make for children with hearing loss. The project strengthens ties within the community and will increase public understanding of hearing loss, enabling parents, educators, and health care professionals to make more informed decisions and advocate for the needs of DHH children, including quality of life.