Abstract

DE OLIVEIRA SOUZA, Esther; GUIMARAES FARIA, Juliana; RODRIGUES DE LIMA, Layane  and  MARTINS, Inés. Digital Content in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras): A Study of Brazilian Channels of Deaf People on YouTube. Comunicação e Sociedade [online]. 2023, vol.43, e023001.  Epub May 01, 2023. ISSN 1645-2089.  https://doi.org/10.17231/comsoc.43(2023).4102.

The subject of this article is the production and authorship of deaf people in Brazil on the internet, specifically on the video-sharing platform and social media YouTube. This cutting-edge theme unveils the relationship of deaf people with digital media that privileges video, an element closely related to the cultural artefact of deaf people (Strobel, 2016) and values sign language, which is the visual experience. It aims to explore the themes produced, exclusively in Brazilian sign language (Libras), by deaf people on YouTube channels. The research methodology has a qualitative approach of the descriptive type (Gil, 2002) and uses, for data collection, the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses method (Prisma; Page et al., 2021) with the snowball sampling type (Vinuto, 2014). We identified 913 videos uploaded on 11 Brazilian deaf authors’ YouTube channels over nine years between 2006, the year the oldest channel analysed was created, and 2021. The contributing authors to the analysis were mainly Festa (2012), Burgess and Green (2009/2009), Coruja (2017) and Medeiros and Rocha (2018). The analysis of the videos allowed identifying more videos with financial themes and observing that the videos with more views are about sign language, identity and deaf culture.

Keywords : Brazilian sign language; YouTube; deaf; Brazil; digital media.

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