As sign language corpus building progresses, the potential for some standards in annotation is beginning to emerge. But there have been no attempts to standardise these practices across corpora, which is required to be able to compare data crosslinguistically. The one-year Digging into Signs project, funded under the Digging into Data Challenge, aims to create clear standards for addressing both types of challenges so as to make cross-linguistic corpus research possible for sign languages. The project puts these standards into practice by creating publicly accessible annotations for two sign languages (BSL & NGT), along with protocols for creating such annotations. We do this for two recent open access sign language corpora that are among the very first in the field – i.e. Sign Language of the Netherlands (Corpus NGT led by PI Onno Crasborn, Radboud University Nijmegen) and British Sign Language (BSL Corpus led by PI Kearsy Cormier. University College London).

The Digging into Signs team is hosting a workshop on 30-31 March 2015 at University College London to share our joint annotation standards with other sign language corpus projects and to get some feedback on them. The programme consists of presentations and posters by researchers who have sign language corpus projects underway and have begun annotation.  See below for draft programme.