SIG:CMC/CoMeRe schema draft for representing CMC in TEI (2014)
Contents
Status of this draft
This page describes a draft for a basic schema for representing 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 metadata schema for CMC
Authors of this draft: Thierry Chanier, N.N., N.N.
Interaction types
Interaction
Participants are in the same interaction space (IS) when they can interact (but not necessarily do it, cf. lurkers). They interact through input devices,(microphone, keyboard, mouse, gloves, etc.), which let them use the modality tools and output devices, mainly producing visual or oral signals. (These however, will not be described in this article). Hence when participants cannot hear nor see the other participants’ actions, they are not in the same IS. Of course, participants may not be participants during the whole time frame of the IS. They can enter late, or leave early.
In an IS, actions occur between participants. Let us call the trace of an action within an environment and one particular modality an “act”. Acts are generated by participants, and sometimes by the system. Some of them may be considered as directly communicative (verbal ones in synchronous text or oral modalities). Others may not be directly communicative but may represent the cause of communicative reaction / interaction (e.g. when participants write collaboratively in an online word processor and comment on their work). Participants see and hear what others are doing. These actions may represent the rationale for participants to be there and to interact (produce something collectively). Hence the distinction between acts, directly communicative or not, is irrelevant.
An important distinction may be made between an IS where only one modality (tool) is used by participants, and an IS where several occur. In the next section, we start presenting some examples of mono modality environments where actions occur en bloc (Beisswenger et al., 2012). A more complicated case appears when an IS uses several modalities. We will also find an example in this article.
Within other multimodal environments verbal (speech, text chat) and nonverbal acts occur simultaneously. The main purpose of transcriptions is then to describe inter-relations amongst acts and within acts: the participant’s utterance may be re-planned when s/he talks depending on other specific acts occurring at the same time (see Wigham & Chanier, 2013). Indeed, written communication can be simultaneously combined with other modalities. For example, there are situations where a participant does not plan an utterance as a one-shot process before it is sent as an en bloc message to a server, which in turn displays it to the other participants as an non modifiable piece of language (e.g. as a text chat turn). Undeniably, an utterance can also be planned, then modified in the throes of the interaction while taking into account what is happening in other modalities of communication (e.g. in an audio chat turn.
|
CMC environment |
Mode & modality |
TEI element |
Main macrostrcuture issues with TEI |
Corpora presently under processing into TEI |
|
SMS |
Text |
<post> |
No notion of addresse (in <head> ?) |
Y |
|
Textchat |
Text |
<post> |
@alias, @type, @subtype |
Y |
|
|
Text |
<post> |
Addresses, readers, copy, attached file, etc. (in <head>) |
Y |
|
Discussion Forum |
Text |
<post> |
Threads (opening, answering) : @ref |
Y |
|
Wikipedia discussion forum |
Text |
<post> |
Reply difficult to identify (indent): @ref |
Y |
|
Blog |
Text + image |
<post> |
Message & comment : @ref |
Y |
|
Audio conferencing system (e.g. Skype) |
Text |
<post> |
|
N |
|
Complex CMC environment |
||||
|
LMS (Learning Management System) : WebCT, Moodle |
Text |
<post> |
One TEIcorpus file |
Y |
|
Audio-graphic conference system (e.g. Lyceum, Centra) |
Text + audio + nonverbal |
<post> <u> <prod> |
Every element at the same level, i.e. mixing of
these elements within a <div> |
Y |
|
Video-graphic or 3D environment (e.g. : Second Life) |
Text + audio + nonverbal |
<post> <u> <prod> |
Idem + set of video files attached to the TEI file |
Y |
Macrostructure
Accordingly to | (Beiswenger et al., 2012), we refer to macro-structure when considering the general information attached to an interaction (adresses, copy-to, title, label, readers, attached files, etc.) as well as issues dealing with way of arranging sets of interactions per modality or interaction space. The micro-structure of the text (next section) refers to the type of elements found in the actual contents of the interaction (<post>, <u> or <prod>) for example interaction words, emoticons, hash code, etc.
Microstructure
text text
