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: N.N., 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

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 —).

under construction

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