SIG:Computer-Mediated Communication

Motivation

In the past three decades, computer networks and especially the internet have brought forth new and emerging genres of interpersonal communication (computer-mediated communication, henceforth CMC). Even though there's been a lot of research on CMC genres and on language use on the internet in linguistics and social sciences as well as in the field of natural language processing, there are still no common standards for the representation and annotation of these new forms of communication and their structural and linguistic peculiarities. Being able to represent CMC data on the basis of an encoding framework such as the TEI which is broadly acknowledged within the field of digital humanities will allow for an interchange of data between research groups and for building interoperable CMC corpora for different languages.

Mission statement / scope and tasks

This special interest group is elaborating on suggestions for adapting the TEI guidelines to the representation of genres of computer-mediated communication (CMC). The focus of the group's work is on (but not limited to) tasks such as:

• modelling user contributions (posts) to written CMC dialogues (which share features both with written discourse and with spoken utterances);
• modelling CMC document structures ("CMC macrostructures" – e.g., forum threads, wiki talk pages, chat logfiles, Twitter timelines etc.);
• annotating linguistic features within user posts ("CMC microstructures" – elements such as emoticons, addressing terms, hashtags; quotes from prior posts; etc.);
• representing linked data and media objects connected with/embedded in CMC discourse;
• metadata schemata for the description of CMC resources;
• developing perspectives for the representation of discourse in multimodal cmc environments in which the participants in one interaction space combine a variety of modalities from written, spoken and non-verbal modes.

The customized TEI schema for CMC genres published in the jTEI (issue 3, 2012) and first presented at the TEI members' meeting in Würzburg (2011) will serve as one of the starting points of the group's work.

Activities and agenda

Report ab out the 1st meeting of the SIG at TEI-MM in Rome (October 03, 2013)

A report about the meeting can be found here.

Panel on CMC in TEI at the TEI-MM in Rome (October 04, 2013)

In addition to the SIG meeting, Michael Beißwenger & Lothar Lemnitzer organized a special-topic panel on "Computer-mediated commuication in TEI: What lies ahead" with contributions of several members of the SIG that was held at the TEI-MM in Rome. The three presentations in the panel gave a report about of experiences with modeling CMC in XML and an outline of phenomena and issues related with the representation of CMC in TEI from the perspective of corpus projects from France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. The overall goal of the panel was to stimulate the further discussion within the TEI community about how a standard for the representation of CMC in TEI should look like and what might be a practical and reasonable way to go about creating such a standard.

Documentation of the panel:

• PDF version of the panel exposé & abstracts
• PDF version of the full presentation held in Rome

Paticipants in the SIG

• Michael Beißwenger - TU Dortmund University
• Thierry Chanier – Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand
• Isabella Chiari – Università "La Sapienza", Rome
• Maria Ermakova – Berlin-Brandenburg of Sciences and the Humanities
• Maarten van Gompel – Radboud University Nijmegen
• Iris Hendrickx – Radboud University Nijmegen
• Axel Herold – Berlin-Brandenburg of Sciences and the Humanities
• Henk van den Heuvel – Radboud University Nijmegen
• Lothar Lemnitzer – Berlin-Brandenburg of Sciences and the Humanities
• Angelika Storrer – TU Dortmund University

Mailing list & further information

For exchange (inbetween the TEI-MMs), the SIG will use the talk pages in the TEI wiki and a mailing list.

• Mailing list: tei-cmc@googlegroups.com (You can register for the list at https://groups.google.com/d/forum/tei-cmc)
• SIG page on the TEI website