Workshop: Exploring new ways of harvesting and generating sign language resources:legal, technical, and crowd-sourcing issues
Hamburg, Germany, December 13 + 14, 2014

Onno Crasborn, Radboud University Nijmegen // Thomas Hanke & Hanna Hedeland, Hamburg University http://www.ru.nl/sign-lang/events/upcoming-workshops/clarin-workshop/

Description (an extended description is on the website)

Sign language corpora have become important data collections for research in recent years. This workshop aims to zoom in on the potential of other types of sign language videos: on the one hand historical film and video recordings, and on the other hand present-day online videos like on YouTube. The workshop brings together people from a variety of fields: sign language linguisticsdeaf historysocial science research on deaf communitiesbroadcasting companies(digital) libraries with expertise in film/video digitisationethics of new technologieslegal expertise on IPR (intellectual property right) issues and licensingcrowd sourcing to collect data and help in collecting metadata and annotations. Many of the technical, ethical, and legal issues involved will be shared with other uses of (audio)visual materials, yet are difficult to tackle for the humanities and social science researchers working on sign languages. May we freely archive historical film/video data and use them for research? What are the legal conditions for using online media on platforms like YouTube? What are the ethical concerns surrounding these type of data? Questions like these will be addressed by experts at the workshop. Further, crowd sourcing could contribute significantly to the involvement of the sign language communities in the efforts to document and analyse their language. This has typically not been given sufficient attention in the past, and adding crowd-sourcing components to both collecting heritage data and the archiving and annotation process could help achieve the goal of creating resources not only for researchers but also for and by the communities.

Programme

The programme will feature a number of invited experts talking about legal, ethical, and crowd-sourcing issues related to online and archived video data, with plenty of time for questions and discussion. Two long poster sessions allow for everyone to find out about ongoing archiving and exploitation efforts in other countries. We will start early on Saturday, and end Sunday by 14:00 so that most people can return home the same day.

Call for posters ‘

We welcome abstracts for posters from people in any of the above fields(linguistics, history, social sciences) on one of three broad themes: Descriptions of sign language archiving projects you have undertaken in your own country, or of data sets that are waiting to be archived. Discussion of one or more of the issues involved (digitisation, IPR, licensing,crowd-sourcing). Presentation of research based on either historical data or on online videos of signlanguage use. Please send us an abstract of max. 200 words by November 2nd, ato.crasborn@let.ru.nl. Notification of acceptance/rejection will follow by November 7th.