Project: FIN-CLARIAH
Grant agreement: Research Council of Finland no. 367751
Start date: 01-01-2026
Duration: 24 months
WP 2.3: Report on developing licensing and protection schemes for sharing sign language data
Date of reporting: 11-06-2026
Report author: Mietta Lennes (University of Helsinki)
Deliverable location: https://www.kielipankki.fi/corpora/resource-families-fin-clarin/sign-language-resources/
Keywords for the deliverable page: sign language; personal data; video processing; sensitive data; SD Desktop
Several resource groups containing sign language material are available via the Language Bank of Finland. The very first sign language resource containing sign language was The Kipo Corpus (2010 The Language Policy Programme for the National Sign Languages in Finland), published openly in 2015. In the years 2016, 2019 and 2024-2025, large numbers of annotated sign language recordings have been published in the CFINSL and CFSTS resource groups of Finnish and Finland-Swedish Sign Language. The sign language corpora can be found on the website of the Language Bank, under the Sign Language Resource Family.
Most sign language resources tend to contain personal data, as the signers are identifiable on the video recordings on the basis of their face, physical appearance and movements. In free signing and signed conversation, the signers may also refer to other people. The data usually cannot be anonymized for research purposes. Due to the personal data, the decisions on the appropriate end-user licenses and the data protection schemes must be made on the basis of the information given to the data subjects (the participating signers), and on the evaluation of the potential risks vs. benefits regarding the processing of the types of data in question.
For sign language communities, it is often desirable to make some language data publicly available. By informing the participating signers in an appropriate way, it is possible to publish the content openly, given that the publication is not considered harmful to the people involved. Some of the above-mentioned resources were made publicly available via the Language Bank of Finland, whereas others are only available for research purposes upon application.
The depositing organization is generally responsible for setting the terms and conditions on how the personal data can be processed and redistributed. If protection is needed, the Language Bank offers options for managing and restricting access to the data via federated academic login (CLARIN ACA type licenses) or individual access granted upon application (CLARIN RES type licenses).
For additional protection, it is even possible to share the data in packages that are separately encrypted for individual users, or the data can be made accessible via SD Desktop provided by CSC. However, the latter two options are currently not used for sign language data. The encryption of large amounts of video files is time-consuming and would often not be in proportion with the protection requirements, since encrypted data would still need to be decrypted for the actual research use. SD Desktop offers a secure environment for analyzing and processing data. The current tools and technical properties of SD Desktop may not yet be sufficient for the convenient playback, annotation and analysis of sign language videos. However, we are collaborating with CSC to investigate the possibilities for adding tools on SD Desktop that would enable users to run useful analyses in manual or batch mode, to produce data that can be safely exported from the secure environment. For further details on sensitive data, see Deliverable 2.1.1 and the support page regarding sensitive data in the Language Bank.
The FIN-CLARIAH project has received funding from the European Union – NextGenerationEU instrument and is funded by the Research Council of Finland under grant number 367751.
Last modified on 2026-06-11
