Research Methods in Sign Language Studies: A Practical Guide, First Edition. Edited by Eleni Orfanidou, Bencie Woll, and Gary Morgan. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 5 Transcription and Notation Methods Onno A. Crasborn Introduction 75 Sign Orthographies and Glossing 76 Phonetic Transcription 78 Other Types of Annotation 82 Standardization of Annotations 83 An Outlook: Open Data and Computer-Assisted Annotation 84 Conclusion 85 Chapter Overview This chapter discusses various methods of notating sign forms, focusing on the manual aspect of signing, for which the largest number of different systems has been proposed. Rather than entering into great detail on the advantages and disadvantages of the various orthographic notation methods and phonetic transcription systems that have been proposed throughout the past forty years, the chapter discusses how notation and transcription can aid present-day researchers that make use of multimodal annotation tools to directly time-link text to videos. Sign language corpora that are currently being created include between 20 and 300 hours of video, which are impossible to fully notate or transcribe for most research groups, let alone individual researchers. For this 0002222460.INDD 74 10/11/2014 7:20:43 AM UNCORRECTED PROOFS