How to be FAIR when you CARE: The DGS Corpus as a Case Study of Open Science Resources for Minority Languages
Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022)
Abstract
The publication of resources for minority languages requires a balance between making data open and accessible and respecting the rights and needs of its language community. The FAIR principles were introduced as a guide to good open data practices and they have since been complemented by the CARE principles for indigenous data governance. This article describes how the DGS Corpus implemented these principles and how the two sets of principles affected each other. The DGS Corpus is a large collection of recordings of members of the deaf community in Germany communicating in their primary language, German Sign Language (DGS); it was created to be both as a resource for linguistic research and as a record of the life experiences of deaf people in Germany. The corpus was designed with CARE in mind to respect and empower the language community and FAIR data publishing was used to enhance its usefulness as a scientific resource.