We are happy to announce the webinar Cross-border projects: which laws apply?, which is organised within the CLARIN-CH Working Group Management of Sensitive and Personal data, Ethical and Legal issues for linguistic data and will include the presentation of two case studies.

Case study 1: Data protection, data storage and data sharing in a Swiss-Indian research project

In this webinar, we present the data protection, data storage and data sharing challenges we have faced as part of the Indo-Swiss research project “Mapping Heritage Language Structure through Sociolinguistic Cues: A Case Study of Swiss Tamil” (2023-2026). The main focus of the project is on the language use of second-generation Swiss Tamil speakers (in the German- and French-speaking parts of Switzerland). In order to compare their language to baseline data, we have also collected data in India and Sri Lanka. The involvement of three countries with different legal requirements, two universities and now likely also an external partner, has required legal agreements between the concerned parties. In this talk, we will thus describe the challenges and the solutions found.

Speakers: Anita Auer is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Lausanne. Rajamathangi Shanmugasundaram is a Postdoctoral Researcher on the above-mentioned Indo-Swiss research project at the University of Lausanne.

Case study 2: How Blurred Can It Get? Considerations on the De-Identification of Video Data in Different Contexts

This talk will present the process of preparing a Swiss dataset of 180 peer discussions between elementary schoolchildren for publication on a German corpus platform for conversational data. The video and transcript data, collected in the course of two SNSF-funded projects on oral argumentation skills, went through various steps of anonymization (i.e., de-identification) to arrive at their final product. I will discuss the challenges that arise when balancing data richness with standards of data protection in different countries and contexts.

Speaker: Oliver Spiess works as a research assistant in the SNSF project KompAS at the University of Basel. He wrangles and analyzes data from 180 peer conversations between schoolchildren with a focus on the argumentation skills at different grades.