This article describes how new technological possibilities allow sign language researchers to share and publish video data and transcriptions online. Both linguistic and technological aspects of creating and publishing a sign language corpus are discussed, and standards are proposed for both metadata and transcription categories specific to sign language data. In addition, ethical aspects of publishing video data of signers online are considered, and suggestions are offered for future corpus projects and software tools.

In his account of the weak hand’s function as a marker at discourse level in American Sign Language, Liddell (2003) introduces the concept of “buoys”, which are signs that are “held in a stationary configuration as the strong hand continues producing signs” (p. 223). The types of buoys identified include list buoys, fragment buoys, the THEME buoy, and the POINTER buoy. In the present chapter we argue that Norwegian Sign Language and Swedish Sign Language have yet another category of buoys, point buoys. In contrast to other types of buoys a point buoy neither represents, nor points at, a prominent discourse entity. Instead, a point buoy represents a point in time or space in relation to which other signs are located and is used for visualizing temporal and spatial relations between entities.