Event schedule

Pre-Conference Gathering at Muflone Rosa.

Social Get-Together with local dishes and drinks at Batznhäusl.

On-site registration will be available from 8.00 to 8.30 for additional 15 EUR.

The best time to talk with speakers and attendees

We will start in the Eurac Research garden and take a group photo.

Paper:

Social Net­work Sites (SNS) claim that they are "on a mis­sion to con­nect the world". They facil­it­ate com­mu­nic­a­tion among people wherever they are loc­ated. Con­sequently, many users of SNS com­mu­nic­ate with a broad and het­ero­genic group of friends on dif­fer­ent occa­sions and thereby express vari­ous aspects of their iden­tit­ies (such as gender, age, eth­nic back­ground etc.). One aspect may also be a local identity.
Users of SNS can show their local iden­tity lin­guist­ic­ally by using a regional vari­ety. Some­times, the use of single region­ally marked words or sporadic regi­olectal spellings are suf­fi­cient to identify the regional back­ground of the writer; in other cases entire text mes­sages and con­ver­sa­tions appear in dia­lectal spellings mean­ing that the dia­lect appears as the main vari­ety of the con­ver­sa­tion. The extent of dia­lect use in com­puter­-­me­di­ated com­mu­nic­a­tion (CMC) may depend on vari­ous factors such as the indi­vidual dia­lect skills, the vivid­ness and prestige of the respect­ive dia­lect in the com­munity, emo­tional involve­ment in the given top­ic, age, gender, the inten­ded recip­i­ent, and other factors prob­ably inter­act­ing with each other.
The use of regional dia­lects in writ­ten CMC is one reason (amongst oth­ers) why lan­guage in CMC often dif­fers from the respect­ive stand­ard lan­guages. Since no ortho­graphic rules are usu­ally avail­able for writ­ing in dia­lect, it is up to the users to rep­res­ent their dia­lect in a proper but read­able and com­pre­hens­ible way. Users have to con­struct their regi­olectal lan­guage vari­ety on the basis of the ortho­graphy of the respect­ive stand­ard lan­guage, which usu­ally allows also for vari­ation. One reason for this may be vari­ous adequate pos­sib­il­it­ies to rep­res­ent a dia­lect word within a given writ­ing sys­tem (e.g. Ger­man). Another reason may be the (some­times very slight) phon­etic dif­fer­ences between region­ally close dia­lects that writers want (or do not want) to turn up in the dia­lect respelling. There­fore, dia­lect respellings are not always coher­ent (neither with respect to a group of dia­lect speak­ers nor with respect to indi­vidual writers) but usu­ally appear in vari­ous forms. However, uni­fic­a­tions of respellings in CMC are described for pidgin lan­guages  and also occur in dia­lectal CMC.
Over the last dec­ade, research­ers star­ted to com­pile cor­pora con­tain­ing dif­fer­ent genres of CMC. Such CMC cor­pora enable a sys­tem­atic ana­lysis of the way dia­lect fea­tures are reflec­ted in writ­ten com­mu­nic­a­tion. In my talk, I will focus on pat­terns of the regional dia­lect(s) in the DiDi Corpus, a col­lec­tion of Face­book mes­sages from around 100 South Tyr­olean writers. I will provide examples of regional fea­tures, ana­lyse the dis­tri­bu­tion of such fea­tures, and dis­cuss chal­lenges of identi­fy­ing local writ­ings on SNS.

Paper:

Mobile com­mu­nic­a­tion tools and plat­forms provide vari­ous oppor­tun­it­ies for users to inter­act over social media. With the recent devel­op­ments in com­pu­ta­tional research and machine learn­ing, it has become pos­sible to ana­lyze large chunks of lan­guage related data auto­mat­ic­ally and fast. However, these tools are not read­ily avail­able to handle data in all lan­guages and there are also chal­lenges hand­ling social media data. Even when these issues are resolved, ask­ing the right research ques­tion to the right set and amount of data becomes cru­cially important.
Both qual­it­at­ive and quant­it­at­ive meth­ods have attrac­ted respect­able research­ers in lan­guage related areas of research. When tack­ling sim­ilar research prob­lems, there is need for both top-­down and bot­tom-up data-­based approaches to reach a solu­tion. Some­times, this solu­tion is hid­den under an in-depth ana­lysis of a small data set and some­times it is revealed only through ana­lyz­ing and exper­i­ment­ing with large amounts of data. However, in most cases, there is need for link­ing the find­ings of small data sets to under­stand the big­ger pic­ture revealed through pat­terns in large sets.
Hav­ing worked with both small and large lan­guage related data in vari­ous forms, I will com­pare pros and cons of work­ing with both types of data across media and con­texts and share my own exper­i­ences with high­lights and lowlights.

The best time to talk with speakers and attendees

The tutorial gives a practical introduction into the annotation of language data from genres of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and social media using TEI.

The tutorial gives a practical introduction into the annotation of language data from genres of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and social media using TEI. Read more

The tutorial gives a practical introduction into the annotation of language data from genres of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and social media using TEI. Read more

Features a series of invited speakers whose work has greatly contributed to the development of Learner Corpus Research. Read more about the event.
Link to the registration: €15 for the LCR 2017 Pre-Conference Workshop and Reception (without attending the LCR 2017 Conference).
Link to more information about LCR registration fees and policy.

Stefania Spina: Learner Corpus Research and the acquisition of Italian as a second language:  the case of the Longitudinal Corpus of Chinese Learners of Italian (LoCCLI).

Paper:

Soci­etal and demo­graphic changes have con­trib­uted to increas­ing bi- and mul­ti­lin­gual­ism in European coun­tries in recent years, and com­mu­nic­a­tion on social media plat­forms such as Twit­ter reflects this lin­guistic diversity. While high rates of Eng­lish use online have been attested for many European coun­tries by sur­vey research, rel­at­ively little work has quan­ti­fied the extent to which Eng­lish is used on social media in European con­texts. In this study, Eng­lish use and bilin­gual­ism with Eng­lish in Europe are invest­ig­ated on Twit­ter.
A large cor­pus of Twit­ter mes­sages with geo­graph­ical metadata was cre­ated by access­ing the Twit­ter APIs. After lan­guage detec­tion and fil­ter­ing, lin­guistic pro­files for European coun­tries were determ­ined and the beha­vior of bi- and mut­lilin­gual users examined. The ana­lysis sup­ports some pre­vi­ous find­ings that sug­gest that a large-s­cale lan­guage shift towards Eng­lish may be ongo­ing in Europe. Geo­graph­ical dif­fer­ences shed light on the dynam­ics of this process.

Paper:

We present a series of exper­i­ments to fit a part-of-speech (PoS) tag­ger towards tag­ging extremely infre­quent PoS tags of which we only have a lim­ited amount of train­ing data.
The object­ive is to imple­ment a tag­ger that tags this phe­nomenon with a high degree of cor­rect­ness in order to be able to use it as a cor­pus query tool on plain text cor­pora, so that new instances of this phe­nomenon can be eas­ily found in plain text.
We focused on avoid­ing manual annota­tion as much as pos­sible and exper­i­mented with alter­ing the fre­quency weight of the PoS tag of interest in the small train­ing data set we have.
This approach was com­pared to adding machine tagged train­ing data in which only the phe­nomenon of interest is manu­ally corrected.
We find that adding more train­ing data is unavoid­able but machine tag­ging data and hand cor­rect­ing the tag of interest is sufficient.
Fur­ther­more, the choice of the tag­ger plays an import­ant role as some tag­gers are equipped to deal with rare phe­nom­ena more adequately than others.
The best trade off between pre­ci­sion and recall of the phe­nomenon of interest was achieved by a sep­ar­a­tion of the tag­ging into two steps
An eval­u­ation of this phe­nomen­on-fit­ted tag­ger on social media plain-­text con­firmed that the tag­ger serves as a use­ful cor­pus query tool that retrieves instances of the phe­nomenon includ­ing many unseen ones.

Paper:

Emoticons play an import­ant role in digital writ­ten com­mu­nic­a­tion: they can serve as mark­ers either of emo­tions or famili­ar­ity, and they can intensify or down­grade the prag­matic force of a text.
The aim of this study is to invest­ig­ate the use of emoticons in Twit­ter by Italian users, and to veri­fy, by rely­ing on cor­pus data and on stat­ist­ical meth­od­o­lo­gies, some of the pre­vail­ing opin­ions on the use of emoticons: that they are tech­nic­ally-driven resources, that they are mostly used by young people, and more often by females, and that they are super­fi­cial and easy ways of express­ing emo­tions using images instead of words.
A mixed-ef­fects model ana­lysis has shown that the use of emoticons on Twit­ter is affected by a com­plex inter­ac­tion of cul­tur­al, tech­no­lo­gic­al, situ­ational and soci­o­lin­guistic variables.

Paper:

This paper invest­ig­ates the lin­guist­ic­ally marked motives that par­ti­cipants attrib­ute to those they call trolls in 991 com­ment threads of three Brit­ish polit­ical blogs. The study is con­cerned with how these motives affect the dis­curs­ive con­struc­tion of trolling and trolls. Another goal of the paper is to exam­ine whether the mainly emo­tional motives ascribed to trolls in the aca­demic lit­er­at­ure cor­res­pond with those that the par­ti­cipants attrib­ute to the alleged trolls in the ana­lysed threads. The paper iden­ti­fies five broad motives ascribed to trolls: emo­tional/mental health-re­lated/so­cial reas­ons, fin­an­cial gain, polit­ical beliefs, being employed by a polit­ical body, and unspe­cified polit­ical affil­i­ation. It also points out that depend­ing on these motives, trolling and trolls are con­struc­ted in vari­ous ways. Finally, the study argues that par­ti­cipants attrib­ute motives to trolls not only to explain their beha­viour but also to insult them.

Paper:

The #Idéo2017 plat­form allows cit­izens to ana­lyze the tweets of the 11 can­did­ates at the French 2017 Pres­id­en­tial Elec­tion. #Idéo2017 pro­cesses the mes­sages of the can­did­ates by cre­at­ing a cor­pus in almost real time. By using tech­niques from lin­guist­ics sup­plied with tools, #Idéo2017 is able to provide the main char­ac­ter­ist­ics of the cor­pus and of the employ­ment of the polit­ical lex­icon, and allows com­par­is­ons between the dif­fer­ent can­did­ates.

Paper:

The present paper deals with Flem­ish adoles­cents' informal com­puter­-­me­di­ated com­mu­nic­a­tion (CMC) in a large cor­pus (2.9 mil­lion tokens) of chat con­ver­sa­tions. We ana­lyze devi­ations from writ­ten stand­ard Dutch and pos­sible cor­rel­a­tions with the teen­agers' gender, age and edu­ca­tional track. The concept of non-stand­ardness is oper­a­tion­al­ized by means of a wide range of fea­tures that serve dif­fer­ent pur­poses, related to the chat­speak max­ims of oral­ity, brev­ity and express­ive­ness. It will be demon­strated how the dif­fer­ent social vari­ables impact on non-stand­ard writ­ing, and, more import­antly, how they inter­act with each oth­er. While the find­ings for age and edu­ca­tion cor­res­pond to our expect­a­tions (more non-stand­ard mark­ers are used by younger adoles­cents and stu­dents in prac­tice-ori­ented edu­ca­tional track­s), the res­ults for gender (no sig­ni­fic­ant dif­fer­ence between girls and boys) do not: they call for a more fine-­grained ana­lysis of non-stand­ard writ­ing, in which fea­tures relat­ing to dif­fer­ent chat prin­ciples are examined separately.

Paper:

This paper reports on a cor­pus-­based ana­lysis of demonym men­tions in the cor­pus of Slov­ene tweets. First, we ana­lyze the fre­quency of men­tions for the demonyms for the inhab­it­ants of the European and G8 countries. Then, we focus on the rep­res­ent­a­tion of demonyms for res­id­ents of Slov­e­ni­a’s neigh­bor­ing coun­tries: Aus­tria, Ita­ly, Hun­gary and Croa­tia. The main topic of the tweets men­tion­ing Croa­tians, Aus­tri­ans and Itali­ans is sport, whereas Hun­gari­ans occur most often in rela­tion to the Euro­vi­sion. Some eco­nomic and polit­ical issues are also rep­res­en­ted, such as the selling of Slov­ene com­pan­ies to for­eign firms, the refugee crisis and the arbit­ra­tion pro­ced­ure between Slov­e­nia and Croa­tia. A col­loc­a­tion ana­lysis revealed a highly ste­reo­typ­ical treat­ment of the neigh­bor­ing nations and hos­til­ity of some Slov­ene Twit­ter users to inhab­it­ants of Slov­e­ni­a’s neigh­bor­ing countries.

Paper:

Present study com­pares four com­puter­-­me­di­ated con­ver­sa­tional registers – com­ments, FB groups, FB status and tweets – and spoken con­ver­sa­tions from Pakistani and US Eng­lish using Biber's Mul­ti­di­men­sional Ana­lysis frame­work on three dimen­sions of vari­ation, i.e. (i) Inter­act­ive versus Descript­ive Explan­at­ory Dis­course, (ii) Expres­sion of Stance, and (iii) Inform­a­tional Focus versus 1st Per­son Nar­rat­ive. Spoken con­ver­sa­tions have a high score on dimen­sion 2, while CM con­ver­sa­tions show register and regional vari­ation on dimen­sion 1 and 3. FB groups are sig­ni­fic­antly dif­fer­ent in both regional vari­et­ies, fol­lowed by FB status, com­ments and tweets. Pakistani FB groups dis­cuss self-help related top­ics, and appear to be slightly inter­act­ive and highly inform­a­tion­al, while the US ones are inter­act­ive and nar­rat­ive dis­cussing com­munity and polit­ical issues. Pakistani FB status and tweets use Eng­lish mainly for inform­a­tional pur­poses, while the US coun­ter­parts have inter­act­ive and per­sonal ori­ent­a­tion indic­at­ing a wider func­tional role of Eng­lish.

Paper:

The cur­rent study addresses the defin­i­tion of a pro­tocol for col­lect­ing, stor­ing data and describ­ing (in a simple and gen­eric way) a databank. Par­tic­u­larly, the trans­par­ency of a form aimed at gath­er­ing inform­a­tion about the ped­ago­gical con­text of oral tele­col­lab­or­a­tion for lan­guage learn­ing named Teletan­dem (TT; Tell­es, 2006) will be tested before it is spread more widely. To uncover prob­lems in sub­mit­ting inform­a­tion, data-in­put-trig­gers qual­ity and reli­ab­il­ity have been tested inter­view­ing pro­fess­ors and lan­guage instruct­ors who will be involved in a pre­lim­in­ary phase of Teletan­dem cor­pus imple­ment­a­tion. Gen­eral goals of the study are to enlarge the research group, to increase data and to improve effi­ciency in data collection.

Paper:

The paper presents res­ults of a case study that com­pared the usage of OKAY across genre types (Wiki­pe­dia art­icles vs. talk pages), across media (spoken vs. writ­ten inter­ac­tion), and across lan­guages (Ger­man vs. French CMC data from Wiki­pe­dia talk pages). The cross-­genre study builds on the res­ults of Herzberg 2016, who com­pared the usage of OKAY in Ger­man Wiki­pe­dia art­icles with its usage in Wiki­pe­dia talk pages. These res­ults also form the basis for com­par­ing the CMC genre of Wiki­pe­dia talk pages with occur­rences of OKAY in the Ger­man spoken lan­guage cor­pus FOLK. Finally, we com­pared the res­ults on the usage of OKAY in Ger­man Wiki­pe­dia talk pages with the usage of OKAY in French Wiki­pe­dia talk pages. With our case study, we want to demon­strate that it is worth­while to invest­ig­ate inter­ac­tion signs across genres and lan­guages, and to com­pare the usage in writ­ten CMC with the usage in spoken inter­ac­tion.

Paper:

Today’s youths are con­tinu­ously engaged with social media. The informal lan­guage they use in com­puter­-­me­di­ated com­mu­nic­a­tion (CMC) often devi­ates from spelling and gram­mar rules of the stand­ard lan­guage. There­fore, par­ents and teach­ers fear that social media have a neg­at­ive impact on youths’ lit­er­acy skills. This paper exam­ines whether such wor­ries are jus­ti­fi­able. An exper­i­mental study was con­duc­ted with 500 Dutch youths of dif­fer­ent edu­ca­tional levels and age groups, to find out if social media affect their pro­duct­ive or per­cept­ive writ­ing skills. We meas­ured whether chat­ting via What­s­App dir­ectly impacts the writ­ing qual­ity of Dutch youths’ nar­rat­ives or their abil­ity to detect ‘spelling errors’ (de­vi­ations from Stand­ard Dutch) in gram­mat­ic­al­ity judge­ment tasks. The use of What­s­App turned out to have no short-term effects on par­ti­cipants’ per­form­ances on either of the writ­ing tasks. Thus, the present study gives no cause for great con­cern about any impact of What­s­App on youths’ school writ­ing.

Paper:

As a con­sequence of a recent cur­a­tion pro­ject, the Dortmund Chat Cor­pus is avail­able in CLAR­IN-D research infra­struc­tures for down­load and query­ing. In a legal expert­ise it had been recom­men­ded that stand­ard meas­ures of anonymisa­tion be applied to the cor­pus before it could be repub­lished. This paper reports about the anonymisa­tion cam­paign that was con­duc­ted for the cor­pus. Anonymisa­tion has been real­ised as cat­egor­isa­tion, and the tax­onomy of anonymisa­tion cat­egor­ies applied is intro­duced and the method of apply­ing it to the TEI files is demon­strated. The res­ults of the anonymisa­tion cam­paign as well as issues of qual­ity man­age­ment are dis­cussed. Finally, pseud­onymisa­tion as an altern­at­ive to cat­egor­isa­tion is dis­cussed in gen­eral as a method of the anonymisa­tion of CMC data, as well as pos­sib­il­it­ies of a (par­tial) auto­mat­isa­tion of the process.

Paper:

The paper deals with the soci­o­lin­guistic concept of prestige imbued in the notion of stand­ard lan­guage, and the social status con­nec­ted to the inher­ent lan­guage skill (or lack there­of). To this end, we ana­lyse Slov­e­nian tweets per­tain­ing to lan­guage use and the (in-)­cor­rect­ness of other users’ use of lan­guage, pro­pose a typo­logy, espe­cially in cases where lan­guage use is used as an argu­ment against someone’s qual­i­fic­a­tions or beliefs.

Paper:

The paper reports on the res­ults of a sci­entific col­loquium ded­ic­ated to the cre­ation of stand­ards and best prac­tices which are needed to facil­it­ate the integ­ra­tion of lan­guage resources for CMC stem­ming from dif­fer­ent ori­gins and the lin­guistic ana­lysis of CMC phe­nom­ena in dif­fer­ent lan­guages and gen­res. The key issue to be solved is that of inter­op­er­ab­il­ity – with respect to the struc­tural rep­res­ent­a­tion of CMC gen­res, lin­guistic annota­tions metadata, and anonym­iz­a­tion/pseud­onym­iz­a­tion schem­as. The object­ive of the paper is to con­vince more pro­jects to par­take in a dis­cus­sion about stand­ards for CMC cor­pora and for the cre­ation of a CMC cor­pus infra­struc­ture across lan­guages and gen­res. In view of the broad range of cor­pus pro­jects which are cur­rently under­way all over Europe, there is a great win­dow of oppor­tun­ity for the cre­ation of stand­ards in a bot­tom-up approach.

Paper:

With the grow­ing volume and import­ance of com­puter­-­me­di­ated com­mu­nic­a­tion, the need to under­stand its lin­guistic and social dimen­sions, along with CMC-ro­bust lan­guage tech­no­lo­gies is on the rise as well. This is reflec­ted in the increas­ing num­ber of con­fer­ences, pro­jects and pos­i­tions involving ana­lysis of CMC in a wide range of dis­cip­lines in Digital Human­it­ies, Social Sci­ences and Com­puter Sci­ence. As a res­ult, a num­ber of valu­able CMC cor­pora, data­sets and tools are being developed but unfor­tu­nately, due to non-neg­li­gible tech­nic­al, legal and eth­ical obstacles, not many are being shared and reused.
Since it is the mis­sion of CLARIN to cre­ate and main­tain an infra­struc­ture to sup­port the shar­ing, use and sus­tain­ab­il­ity of lan­guage data and tools for research­ers in Digital Human­it­ies and Social Sci­ences, it is our goal to have a good over­view of the avail­able resources and tools, to offer sup­port to their developers to over­come the tech­nic­al, legal and eth­ical obstacles and deposit them to the CLARIN infra­struc­ture, as well as to the research­ers with diverse back­grounds, such as lin­guist­ics, media stud­ies, psy­cho­logy etc., but also to inter­ested parties from the edu­ca­tion­al, com­mer­cial, polit­ic­al, med­ical and legal sec­tors of the soci­ety who are inter­ested in using them.
The first step in this dir­ec­tion was an inter­dis­cip­lin­ary workshop on the cre­ation and use of social media which was organ­ized within the Hori­zon 2020 CLAR­IN-PLUS pro­ject on 18 and 19 May 2017 in Kaun­as, Lithuania. The aims of the work­shop were to demon­strate the pos­sib­il­it­ies of social media resources and nat­ural lan­guage pro­cessing tools for research­ers with a diverse research back­ground and an interest in empir­ical research of lan­guage and social prac­tices in com­puter­-­me­di­ated com­mu­nic­a­tion, to pro­mote inter­dis­cip­lin­ary cooper­a­tion pos­sib­il­it­ies, and to ini­ti­ate a dis­cus­sion on the vari­ous approaches to social media data col­lec­tion and pro­cessing.
The work­shop also served as a plat­form to con­duct a survey of cor­pora, data­sets and tools of com­puter­-­me­di­ated com­mu­nic­a­tion in the lan­guages spoken in coun­tries that are mem­bers and observ­ers of CLARIN ERIC. Apart from identi­fy­ing the exist­ing resources and tools, our motiv­a­tion was to estab­lish to which extent they are access­ible through the CLARIN infra­struc­ture and how the inform­a­tion and access­ib­il­ity of them could be fur­ther optim­ized from a user perspective.
In this talk, we will give an over­view of the iden­ti­fied cor­pora, the smal­ler, more focused data­sets and tools that are tailored to pro­cessing com­puter­-­me­di­ated com­mu­nic­a­tion. The focus of the talk will be on the com­pre­hens­ive­ness of the provided metadata, level of avail­ab­il­ity and access­ib­il­ity of the iden­ti­fied resources and tools and the degree of their actual or poten­tial inclu­sion in the CLARIN infra­struc­ture. We will also dis­cuss the simple and long-term pos­sib­il­it­ies of enrich­ing the cur­rent state of the infra­struc­ture and provide guidelines for cre­at­ing and depos­it­ing CMC resources with a CLARIN center.

This poster gives an over­view on the Italian national CLARIN con­sor­tium and the status of CLAR­IN-IT in gen­er­al. It thus dis­cusses the cur­rent state of affairs of the con­sor­tium and provides inform­a­tion on the mem­bers, espe­cially with regards to what they offer to CLARIN in terms of resources, ser­vices and expert­ise, and what CLARIN offers them to fur­ther their own research.

Paper:

The poster reports about inter­me­di­ate res­ults of MoCoDa 2, an ongo­ing pro­ject fun­ded by the Min­istry for Innov­a­tion, Sci­ence, Research and Tech­no­logy of the Ger­man fed­eral state North Rhine-West­phalia in which we are devel­op­ing a data­base and web fron­tend for the repeated, dona­tion-­based col­lec­tion of CMC inter­ac­tions from smart­phone mes­saging apps like What­s­App. The data­base shall serve as a resource not only for quant­it­at­ive but also for qual­it­at­ive approaches in the ana­lysis of CMC. MoCoDa 2 builds on exper­i­ences from the pre­ced­ing pro­ject MoCoDa which has col­lec­ted a (re­l­at­ively small) set of 2,198 inter­ac­tions with 19,161 user posts or ca.~193,000 tokens since 2012. For MoCoDa 2 the data­base and web fron­tend will be re-im­ple­men­ted from the scratch and expan­ded with addi­tional func­tions and features:
- A form for donat­ing and edit­ing the data, which involves the donat­ors into the edit­ing and anonym­iz­a­tion pro­cess and assists them with cap­tur­ing metadata on the con­text and topic of the donated sequences as well as on the inter­locutors and their social rela­tions. Anonym­iz­a­tion will fol­low an anonym­iz­a­tion guideline developed in the CLAR­IN-D cur­a­tion pro­ject ChatCorpus2CLARIN.
- Part-of-speech annota­tions which com­ply with the exten­ded ‘STTS 2.0’ tag­set for Ger­man CMC and which will be cre­ated using a tool­chain provided by the Lan­guage Tech­no­logy Lab (LTL) at the Uni­ver­sity of Duisburg-Essen.
- A TEI export for the col­lec­ted data on basis of the ‘CLAR­IN-D TEI schema for CMC’.
Through adopt­ing the STTS 2.0 tag­set and a TEI-­based export format the cor­pus data will be inter­op­er­able with cor­pora that are already part of the CLAR­IN-D cor­pus infra­struc­ture at the Insti­tute for the Ger­man Lan­guage (IDS) in Mannheim. To allow for com­par­at­ive ana­lyses of the MoCoDa 2 data with the dis­course found in text cor­pora and in other CMC cor­pora, MoCoDa 2 will not only be made avail­able as a stan­dalone resource but also be integ­rated into the Ger­man Ref­er­ence Cor­pus (DeReKo) at the IDS Mannheim.

Paper:

/l/-­vocal­iz­a­tion is a fea­ture nor­mally found in a rather clear cut area in the west­ern part of Switzer­land. Its geo­graph­ical bound­ar­ies are well doc­u­mented as well as social influ­ences on the real­isa­tion of the vari­ants. This study, based on a cor­pus of authen­tic What­s­App mes­sages, takes another approach by doc­u­ment­ing isol­ated forms of /l/-­vocal­iz­a­tion out­side the area tra­di­tion­ally attrib­uted to the fea­ture.

Paper:

As social net­work­ing sites have become staples in every­day life an increas­ing num­ber of people world­wide use social media as a source of news. To reach this audi­ences, news organ­isa­tions and pub­lic ser­vice broad­casters have ven­tured on ser­vices such as Face­book, which in terms of news is by far the most import­ant social net­work­ing site in many parts of Europe. This poster present­a­tion explores the ways in which pub­lic ser­vice media from dif­fer­ent European coun­tries are deliv­er­ing news on pub­lic Face­book Pages. The ana­lysis is based on pub­lic data gathered from dif­fer­ent Face­book pages oper­ated by national broad­cast­ing agen­cies. The data are extrac­ted using the pub­lic Face­book Graph API. The cor­pus con­tains all the posts and com­ments of the Face­book Pages as well as related metadata. No per­son­ally-iden­ti­fi­able inform­a­tion is collected.
The social media data are explored using stat­ist­ical research meth­ods to identify and com­pare dif­fer­ent usage pat­terns and to visu­al­ise the reac­tions of Face­book users. This provides an over­view over the dif­fer­ent forms of con­tent (i.e. types of posts) and the basic com­mu­nic­at­ive prac­tices that can be observed in the con­text of the Face­book Pages (i.e. num­ber of com­ments, shares, likes and Reac­tion types). To allow deeper insights an explor­at­ory case­-study approach is used. Draw­ing upon media lin­guistic research the focus is on the micro level of the media texts and their mul­timodal design. The in-depth ana­lysis aims to char­ac­ter­ise dif­fer­ent forms of news report­ing via Face­book and looks at the dif­fer­ent usage of mul­timodal res­sources in the con­text of the Face­book posts and comments.
This com­bin­a­tion of qual­it­at­ive and quant­it­at­ive meth­ods should allow a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how Face­book is used as a means of news dis­tri­bu­tion by pub­lic ser­vice media pro­viders on a large scale and how tech­nical afford­ances shape the design of news con­tent and fol­low-up inter­ac­tions. This know­ledge is crit­ical for the dis­cus­sion of the emer­ging role of social media in the con­text of pub­lic opin­ion and polit­ical decision-­mak­ing. The poster presents the pro­ject as work in pro­gress and shows pre­lim­in­ary findings.