Issues in the creation of a digital archive of a signed language

Introduction In this paper we summarise the fieldwork involved in creating the Auslan (Australian Sign Language) archive and corpus. We briefly discuss some of the technical and ethical problems in data collection and management associated with visually based linguistic data for an archive intended to be as open as possible. We also discuss the new research questions opened up by the existence of signed language data in this new form. The Auslan archive is the output of a project funded by the Endangered Languages Documentation Program within the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London and is to be submitted in mid-2007.