Increasing numbers of sign language researchers are seeking to create large corpora of sign language digital video data. By 2009, projects were underway in Australia, Ireland, The Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom and Germany, for example, and more were being planned in other parts of the world. This workshop aimed to share experiences from current work and plans for future work. What are the descriptive and theoretical challenges being encountered and what solutions are being proposed? What kinds of linguistic data are being collected? What linguistic and sociolinguistic factors are being considered in corpus design? What standards for linguistic tagging and metadata are being used and how can these be improved? What kinds of linguistic research questions are being addressed using sign language corpus data? What kinds of linguistic evidence can corpora provide? What implications does sign language corpus work have for linguistic theory/theories?

We invited abstracts for 30 minute papers or posters on descriptive, theoretical and applied linguistic issues in corpus-based approaches to sign language research, including the following topics:

  • Linguistic and sociolinguistic issues in building sign language corpora
  • Linguistic issues in annotation or for metadata descriptions
  • Reports from linguistic research using corpora
  • Use of corpora in sign language teaching and learning
  • Use of parallel corpora in sign language research, and interpreting/translation studies
  • Language documentation, archiving and preservation of sign language data
  • Linguistic issues in the development of annotation software and automated sign language recognition