SIG:CMC/CoMeRe metadata schema draft for CMC (2014)

Status of this draft
This page describes a draft for a metadata schema for genres on computer-mediated communication (CMC) in TEI. The draft has been created by members of the TEI-SIG "Computer-Mediated Communication".

The SIG encourages everybody to discuss this draft and give their feedback/comments using the "discussion" function on top of this page. The comments/discussions will be carefully taken into consideration in the further development of the schema.

The history of the draft is documented on the main wiki page of the SIG. This page should be read in parallel to SIG:CMC/Draft: A basic schema for representing CMC in TEI.

Authors of this draft: Thierry Chanier, N.N., N.N.

Rationales for Modelling CMC discourse
Note : we use the terme CMC (which stands for Computer-Mediated Communication) in a broad meaning, when refering to all kinds of Networks Mediated Communication (cf. SMS).

Annotation is basically an interpretation and the TEI markup naturally encompasses hypotheses concerning what a text is and what it should be. Although the TEI was historically dedicated to the markup of literature texts, various extensions have been developed for the annotation of other genres and discourses, including poetry, dictionaries, language corpora or speech transcriptions. If one wants to still apply the word “text” to a coherent and circumscribed set of CMC interactions, it is not so much in the sense originally developed by the TEI. Indeed, it would be closer to the meaning adopted by Bauldry & Thibault (2006). These authors consider (ibid: 4) “texts to be meaning-making events whose functions are defined in particular social contexts” following Halliday (1989:10) who declared that “any instance of living language that is playing a role some part in a context of situation, we shall call it a text. It may be either spoken or written, or indeed in any other medium of expression that we like to think of.”

Bearing the above in mind, we found it more relevant to start from a general framework, that we will term “Interaction Space”, encompassing, from the outset, the richest and the more complex CMC genres and situations. Therefore, we did not work genre by genre, nor with scales that would, for instance, oppose simple and complex situations (e.g. unimodal versus multimodal environments) - as said, our goal is to release guidelines for all CMC documents and not for each CMC genre. This also explains why we did not limit ourselves solely to written communication. For these reasons, we take multimodality into account and our approach is akin to the one under discussion in European networks delaing with TEI and oral corpora: they tend to reject the collection and study of oral corpora as self contained elements and prefer to study  oral and multimodal corpora  within a common framework.

Interaction space: time, location, participants
An Interaction Space (henceforth referred to as IS) is an abstract concept, located in time (with a beginning and ending date with absolute time, hence a time frame) where interactions between a set of participants occur within an online location. The online location is defined by the properties of the set of environments used by the set of participants. Online means that interactions have been transmitted through networks, Internet, Intranet, telephone, etc. The set of participants is composed of individual members or groups. It can be a predefined learner group or a circumscribed interest group. A mandatory property of a group is the listing of its participants.

The range of types of interactions (and their related locations) is widespread. On one end of the scale, we find simple types with one environment based on one modality / tool (e.g., one email system, or text chat system, etc). On the other end of the scale, complex environments such as LMSs, where several type of communication modalities are integrated (see hereafter example with the LMS WebCT which uses only textual modalities synchronous — text chat — and asynchronous — email and forum —).

Environment, mode and modality
An environment may be synchronous or asynchronous, mono or multimodal. Multimodality refers to environments that offer several interaction tools, integrated within the same interface. Every tool uses one mode of communication (e.g., oral, text, icon, nonverbal) and one modality  (e.g., a text chat has a specific textual modality, different from the modality of a collective word processor, although both are based on the same textual mode). Every modality has its own grammar which constraints interactions. The icon modality within an audio-graphic environment is composed of a finite set of icons (raise hand, clap hand, is_talking, momentarily absent, etc.). Consequently, an interaction may be multimodal because several modes are used and/or several modalities.

An environment offers the participants one or more locations / places in which to interact. For example, a conference system may have several rooms where a set of participants may work separately in sub-groups or gather in one place. In a 3D environment such as the synthetic world Second Life, a location may be an island or a plot. A plot may even be divided into small sub-plots where verbal communication (text chat, audio) is impossible from one to another. Hence we say that participants are in the same location / place if they can interact at a given time. Notions of location and interaction are closely related and are defined by the affordances of the environment. Lastly, an IS is an abstract space where interaction occurs. When the same participants interact over several weeks, different interaction sessions will occur.

More information on interactions in SIG:CMC/Draft: A basic schema for representing CMC in TEI

Environments and affordances
The first step when describing an environment is to define the general features attached to the overall environment type to which it belongs (e.g., IRC text chat systems). However, this needs to be refined in order to elicit specific features of the system. For example, (1a) describes, in TEI, the general text chat modality where inside one public channel every  connected participant may interact with the other participants. Example (1b), however, details the affordances related to the specific IRC system used in cmr-getalp_org. This simplified extract displays the three main types of chat actions (message, command, and event), and part of the subtype of events.

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