Approaches to the Anonymisation of Sign Language Corpora

In this paper we survey the state of the art for the anonymisation of sign language corpora. We begin by exploring the motivations behind anonymisation and the close connection with the issue of ethics and informed consent for corpus participants. We detail how the the names which should be anonymised can be identified. We then describe the processes which can be used to anonymise both the video and the annotations belonging to a corpus, and the variety of ways in which these can be carried out. We provide examples for all of these processes from three sign language corpora in which anonymisation of the data has been performed.