What Does “Informed Consent” Mean in the Internet Age?

Recent technologies in the area of video and Internet are allowing the creation and online publication of large signed language corpora. Primarily addressing the needs of linguists and other researchers, because of their unique character in history these data collections are also made accessible online for a general audience. This “open access” publication may benefit the language communities from which the recordings stem, yet they also raise some ethical concerns. In particular, informed consent is hard to obtain if, due to future technological developments, the consequences of online publication cannot be foreseen. While this problem cannot be resolved, in this article I propose that the benefits of open access publication outweigh the possible objections. The first-time availability of large-scale language resources to not only researchers but also members of the deaf communities that are involved opens up a new era for sign language studies, and has a potential political effect that should not be underestimated.

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