Working with ASL Internet Data.

The internet has become a space where many sign language users post, watch, and share videos and video blogs (vlogs) through social media. This mass of videos produced by, for, and with deaf signers on the internet has yielded a new language ecology that also offers new opportunities for sign language research. We demonstrate how sign language researchers can use the internet for linguistic "fieldwork" by harnessing available, naturalistic sign language data from this online corpus of videos. We discuss a preliminary case study of first-person pronouns based on two vlogs, as a way of offering some practical guidelines for researchers who want to conduct methodologically valid sign language internet-based corpus studies. This case study examines the potential the internet offers for future research advancing the field of sign language linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]