SIG:CMC/2nd SIG meeting in Dortmund, 20 February 2014

Report about the 2nd meeting of the TEI-SIG "Computer-Mediated Communication" on 20 Feburary 2014 at TU Dortmund University Main page of the CMC-SIG in this wiki: SIG:Computer-Mediated Communication

The meeting was held as part of the 7th workshop of the scientific network Empirikom on "Social Media Corpora for the eHumanities: Standards, Challenges, and Perspectives".

Participants / contributors

 * Michael Beißwenger (Dortmund)
 * Thierry Chanier(Clermont-Ferrand)
 * Isabella Chiari (Rome)
 * Maria Ermakova (Berlin)
 * Axel Herold (Berlin)
 * Kun Jin (Clermont-Ferrand)
 * Lothar Lemnitzer (Berlin)
 * Iris Hendrickx (Nijmegen)
 * Laurent Romary (INRIA)
 * Angelika Storrer (Dortmund)
 * Andreas Witt (Mannheim)

+ members of the Empirikom network

Intermediate results from ongoing work
The members of the SIG presented and discussed intermediate results from work on the issues that had been defined as a first agenda for the SIG at the 1st SIG meeting in Rome:
 * the definition of a basic framework that allows for the representation of data from written CMC genres
 * the definition of a structure for the description of the communication environment within a metadata schema for CMC

In addition, Laurent Romary gave an overview of options for managing change in the TEI guidelines. Andreas Witt gave an overview of issues of joint interest and possible cooperations between the CMC-SIG and the SIG for Linguists.

Presentations (slides)

 * 1) Introduction: General Requirements and Issues in Defining a TEI Schema for the Representation of CMC (Michael Beißwenger)
 * 2) Activities of the SIG 'TEI for Linguists' and possible cooperations with the SIG 'CMC' (Andreas Witt)
 * 3) Managing change in the TEI guidelines (Laurent Romary)
 * 4) A Basic Schema for the Representation of CMC in TEI:Current State (Maria Ermakova, Michael Beißwenger, Thierry Chanier, Kun Jin, Lothar Lemnitzer, Angelika Storrer)
 * 5) Metadata for CMC: Keypoints and Open Issues (Axel Herold, Isabella Chiari, Thierry Chanier)

AGEDNA: add slides

Discussion and results

 * There is a range of issues of joint interest between the Linguists-SIG and the CMC-SIG. Cooperation and joint activities are of interest for both sides => plan for a joint meeting of both SIGs at the TEI-MM2014?
 * A reasonable way to go about making proposals for adapting the TEI guidelines to the peculiarities of CMC genres: (1) Describe ideas/suggestions and discuss them on the TEI list, (2) Formalize proposals and put them on Sourceforge as feature requests => plan to start into step (1) as soon as possible by documenting the ideas/suggestions from the Dortmund meeting on the SIG's wiki pages and inviting people via the TEI list to comment/discuss these suggestions; subsequently revise suggestions considering feedback/comments/issues raised in the discussions and then do step (2) and make a feature request (starting with the basic schema)
 * The current version of the basic schema comprises models needed for the representation of both text-only CMC and multimodal CMC (namely the models, &lt;u> and ). The TEI schema developed for the representation of the CoMeRe corpora is already conformant with this basic schema. Laurent: "Write down good arguments why you think you need the new elements/models in your schema (and why you couldn't use elements/models which already exist in TEI-P5) when you make a feature request/invite other people from the TEI to comment on and discuss your suggestions.
 * Metadata for CMC: one very essential aspect is the description of the platform/interface of the communication technology/environment => What features are needed to describe the technical framewoprk which is relevant for interpreting the data to somebody who doesn't know/doesn't have the option to experience the communication environment themselves? How detailed should the metadata on this aspect be? => Idea: (1) Ask people who are researching on CMC to give prose descriptions of selected communication environments which they find relevant for understanding data recorded from these environments. (2) Find out which categories are relevant in several of these prose descriptions and try to create a category set for the description of CMC environments bottom-up.

Next steps/further work

 * Further work on the basic schema and on the ideas about metadata:
 * Documentation of the suggestions/ideas presented at the Dortmund meeting as drafts on special pages in the TEI wiki (cf. Draft: basic schema, Draft: metadata).
 * Invite other people from the TEI community to comment on/discuss these suggestions via the TEI list. Encourage people to use the discussion function in the wiki to preserve their feedback.
 * Revise suggestions considering the comments/discussions and the create feature requests.
 * Joint meeting of the CMC-SIG and the Linguists-SIG at the TEI-MM2014 in Evanston (already communicated to Martin Mueller/organizer of TEI-MM2014).