Convenors

Marie-Louise Brunner (Trier University of Applied Sciences), Stefan Diemer (Trier University of Applied Sciences), Matt Gee (Birmingham City University) & Andrew Kehoe (Birmingham City University)

Workshop description

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) provides an ideal opportunity to study developments in contemporary English as they happen. This workshop aims to provide a discussion forum for researchers who are compiling and analyzing CMC data from a wide range of contexts. We invite research on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.), blogs, forums, e-commerce, as well as online (email, IM) and video-mediated communication.

In particular, we are interested in research which discusses issues arising from the complex nature of CMC data. The workshop considers questions about data compilation, management, and analysis and invites researchers to approach data in new and flexible ways. We welcome innovative solutions and/or interdisciplinary studies combining fields such as corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, (multimodal) discourse analysis, and pragmatics.

Recent studies in CMC focus, for example, on regional and social variation (Huang et al. 2016), stance and solidarity (Evans 2016), self-branding (Page 2012), (im)politeness and online aggression (Lambert Graham & Hardaker 2017, Lutzky & Kehoe, 2017), topic and sentiment (Bourlai & Herring 2014, Kehoe & Gee 2012), multimodality, and interaction strategies (Brunner, Diemer & Schmidt 2016, Honey & Herring 2009).

By bringing together researchers working with CMC data we intend to foster an exchange of ideas for dealing with complex and multimodal datasets. Contributions to the workshop should thus illustrate problematic aspects and possible solutions with the help of concrete linguistic case studies. The workshop will close with a round table providing room for a discussion of opportunities and challenges with regard to this new data.

References

Bourlai, E. and Herring, S.C., 2014, June. Multimodal communication on tumblr: i have so many feels! Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science. ACM, pp. 171-175.
Brunner, M.-L., Diemer, S., and Schmidt, S., 2016. “It’s always different when you look something from the inside” – Linguistic innovation in a corpus of ELF Skype conversations. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 2(2), pp. 321-348.
Diemer, S., Brunner, M.-L., and Schmidt, S., 2016. Compiling computer-mediated spoken language corpora: Key issues and recommendations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 21(3): 349-371.
Evans, A., 2016. Stance and Identity in Twitter Hashtags. Language@Internet 12(1).
Honey, C. and Herring, S.C., 2009. Beyond microblogging: Conversation and collaboration via Twitter. HICSS'09, 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2009. IEEE, pp. 1-10.
Huang, Y., Guo, D., Kasakoff, A. and Grieve, J., 2016. Understanding US regional linguistic variation with Twitter data analysis. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 59, pp. 244–255
Kehoe, A. and Gee, M., 2013. eMargin: A Collaborative Textual Annotation Tool. Ariadne 71.
Kehoe, A. and Gee, M., 2012. Reader comments as an aboutness indicator in online texts: introducing the Birmingham Blog Corpus. Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English, ed. by S. Oksefjell Ebeling, J. Ebeling and H. Hasselgård. Helsinki: Varieng.
Kehoe, A. and Gee, M., 2007. New corpora from the web: making web text more 'text-like' in P. Pahta, I. Taavitsainen, T. Nevalainen and J. Tyrkkö (eds.) Towards Multimedia in Corpus Studies, electronic publication, University of Helsinki.
Lambert Graham, S. & Hardaker, C. 2017, (Im)politeness in digital communication. in J. Culpeper, M. Haugh & D. Kádár (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness. Palgrave, London, pp. 785-814.
Lutzky, U. and Kehoe, A., 2017. "I apologise for my poor blogging": Searching for Apologies in the Birmingham Blog Corpus. Corpus Pragmatics 1(1), pp. 1-20.
Muñoz, A.S., 2016. Attending Multi-Party Videoconference Meetings: The Initial Problem. Language@Internet 13(3).
Page, R., 2012. The linguistics of self-branding and micro-celebrity in Twitter: The role of hashtags. Discourse & Communication 6(2), pp.181-201.

Abstract submission

Please send your abstract (500 words including references) to ml.brunner(at)umwelt-campus.de before 31/01/2019.