A serious impediment to the historical study of signed languages has been the lack of historical data. Despite our growing understanding of sign languages, particularly ASL, there is still a dramatic and profound limitation on the availability of literary, linguistic, historical and other reference materials related to sign languages. In large part, this is because there is no commonly used writing system for signed languages. The existing literature is therefore transmitted 'orally' and not represented in print. Such materials are critical for scholars interested in historical, linguisitc, cognitive or literary studies. Although there has been some research on the historical roots of individual ASL signs, virtually no historical research on language genesis or grammatical change, which are common and core areas of spoken language linguistics, exists on signed languages. At the moment, only researchers already fluent in a particular sign language are capable of doing research on it.

Five years ago, Ted Supalla and Patricia Clark began to develop a transcription and linguistic coding of the historically valuable NAD films (see Background). They had an interest in examining whether between that time and the present one could see evidence of significant historical change in the structure of signs and sentences in the language. To date, the SLRC has developed three different types of database work with the NAD films. Our ultimate goal is to build a comprehensive platform to store and access the NAD films, equipped with a variety of different search engines, and links to other relevant data.

At present we are working on creating links from the historical ASL data to other tokens of the same sign within the early ASL materials and to a digitized video of the same sign in modern ASL. Additionally, we are creating links to entries in historical sign language dictionaries, which we have located and begun reconstructing, as well as links to the equivalent sign in historically related foreign sign languages (for example, Langue des Signes Francaise).