Using ELAN for annotating sign language corpora in a team setting

ELAN is a multimedia annotation tool that is employed in many sign language corpus projects. It is a standalone desktop application that, like many other desktop applications, principally is a single user, document oriented application. In many scenarios this is still perfectly satisfactory but in large-scale corpus projects, involving many collaborators who are working on the same documents, the problem arises of how to resolve edit conflicts and how to prevent undesirable modifications to parts of the document. The Corpus NGT project is such a project and this paper describes the challenges that arose in the process of its creation as well as in the exploitation of this large collection of annotation documents. It outlines recent and possible future development of ELAN and alternate solutions that have been explored and applied.