Call for participation: Workshop on metadata for signed language resources, Nijmegen 13 Nov 2009

[Onno Crasborn]

[First announcement and call for participation]

   ====================================
	Sign Linguistics Corpora Network (SLCN)
	Worskhop on metadata

	Place:	Nijmegen, The Netherlands
	Date:	Fri 13 November 2009
	URL:	http://www.ru.nl/slcn
	Languages: English + ASL
   ====================================


Dear all,

Metadata will become crucial for the research we will undertake in the  
coming decades. Metadata are the cataloguing information that apply to  
any digital resource. We are all using more and more (annotated)  
digital video material for our work. Technical developments in the  
area of digital video and annotation tools have made it easier to use  
and re-use linguistic resources. Increasingly, the data we use for  
linguistic research are not collected by ourselves for the research  
questions at hand, but consist of (parts of) data collections that  
either have been collected by ourselves in earlier work, or are  
collected and published by other researchers working on the same  
language. Our data may even consist of data collected by others on  
other signed languages. This development is not exclusively limited to  
systematically collected sign language corpora, such as those for  
Auslan, NGT, BSL or DGS: any (analogue or digital) video may be  
equally suited for re-use, depending on the nature of the research  
questions. There surely lies great value in archiving older data,  
especially given the lack of historical sources for most signed  
languages.

The possibility of sharing and re-using linguistic data is dependent  
on correct documentation of the resources in question, but also on  
standards of coding and cataloguing. Metadata contain text information  
on the nature of the recordings: when and by who was it recorded, who  
are the signers, what was the elicitation material (if any), et  
cetera. There are different standards for metadata for spoken language  
resources (such as the Dublin Core, OLAC, IMDI); within the EU project  
CLARIN (http://www.clarin.eu), an effort is made to integrate several  
of these. It is up to the sign linguistics community to ensure that  
specific properties of sign language resources are taken into account  
in these developments.

The second workshop of the Sign Linguistics Corpora Network is devoted  
to "Metadata for sign language resources", and will take place next  
month in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. It will be a small-scale and  
highly interactive event.  The goal is to inform sign researchers  
about recent developments on metadata in the EU CLARIN project, and at  
updating an earlier list of sign-specific metadata categories that  
were the output of a workshop in 2003.

We would like to invite anyone with an interest in or specific  
experience with sign language data collections to join us in this one- 
day workshop. Further enquiries can be directed at Onno Crasborn, o.crasborn at let.ru.nl 
. We look forward to a wide participation from the sign linguistics  
community, and hope you will be able to join us on November 13th in  
the Netherlands.

The workshop languages will be English and ASL.

On behalf of the SLCN partners,

Onno Crasborn, network chair
http://www.ru.nl/slcn

--- SLCN Partners ---
Radboud University Nijmegen (Onno Crasborn)
Stockholm University (Johanna Mesch)
ILSP, Athens (Eleni Efthimiou)
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh (Graham Turner/Elaine Farrow)
University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg (Jens Hessmann)
University College London (Adam Schembri)
Hamburg University (Thomas Hanke)
Virtual Knowledge Studio / Groningen University (Ernst Thoutenhoofd)


____________________________________________
Dr. O.A. Crasborn

Department of Linguistics & Centre for Language Studies
Radboud University Nijmegen
PO Box 9103, NL-6500 HD Nijmegen, Netherlands

http://www.let.ru.nl/sign-lang
http://www.corpusngt.nl
http://www.slls.eu
http://www.ru.nl/slcn

T +31 24 3611377
F +31 24 3611070

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