Apologies for cross-posting. -------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 11:12:24 From: Michael Beisswenger < michael.beisswenger@uni-dortmund.de > Subject: Corpora and Methods in Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis Full Title: Corpora and Methods in Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis Short Title: Corpora & Methods in CMDA Date: 08-Jul-2007 - 13-Jul-2007 Location: Göteborg, Sweden Contact Person: Michael Beisswenger Meeting Email: michael.beisswenger@uni-dortmund.de Linguistic Field(s): Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics Call Deadline: 05-Sep-2006 Meeting Description: Corpora and Methods in Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis We invite contributions to a panel proposal for the 10th International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA), 8-13 July 2007, Göteborg, Sweden. Proposals are expected to discuss aspects of the panel topic (see detailed CfP above), based on empirical research on computer-mediated discourse in any language. Panel organizers: Jannis Androutsopoulos, University of Hannover, Germany Michael Beisswenger, University of Dortmund, Germany The purpose of this panel is to discuss methodological issues in computer-mediated discourse studies. Computer-mediated discourse (CMD) is used here as an umbrella term for all kinds of interpersonal (private and public) communication carried out on the Internet by e-mail, instant messaging systems, mailing lists, newsgroups, web discussion boards, Internet Relay Chat, and web chat channels (cf. Herring 2001, 2004). While CMD in the last decade has attracted a great deal of research attention from the pragmatic, discourse-analytic, and sociolinguistic points of view, methodological reflection still lags behind when compared to other areas of discourse studies. While the collection of linguistic data on the Internet seems trivial at first sight, researchers are confronted with a variety of non-trivial questions in the further process, relating to e.g. the size of a data sample, its representativeness or typicality, data processing techniques, delimitation of genres, kind and amount of necessary contextual information, as well as ethical issues of anonymity and privacy protection. Much research in the field has been based on rather small, individually compiled data sets. There is a lack of generally acknowledged guidelines of corpus design as well as of publicly available, dedicated corpora of CMD. In terms of methodology, language-focused research on computer-mediated communication has drawn on methods and key concepts from a variety of research traditions in linguistics (including pragmatics and conversation analysis, interactional and variationist sociolinguistics, genre analysis, and the ethnography of communication). These methods and concepts have been fruitfully applied, and sometimes combined, to study how individuals use linguistic resources to establish contacts, manage interactions, and construct identities within computer networks. This panel will focus on the need for critical reflection about the problems and challenges that arise when these research traditions, originally developed for the study of face-to-face discourse, are applied to the new settings and environments of computer-mediated discourse. Does a one-to-one transfer of research frameworks really lead to contextually rich understandings of language use and interactional processes in CMD, or rather conceal some of its essential new aspects? Research findings suggest that CMD creates important implications for our understanding of key concepts such as interactional coherence, participant frameworks, intertextuality, language-identity-relationships, and the notion of community. To that extent, an adaptation or even reconceptualization of existing concepts and methods seems a necessary step in the further development of CMD studies, and new research frameworks are already emerging (e.g. Herring's approach to the study of online communities; Herring 2004). Against this background, the contributions to this panel will focus on questions such as: - challenges, problems and solutions in the compilation and design of CMD corpora, including the presentation of relevant new projects; - corpus linguistics issues in CMD, e.g. acquisition, preprocessing and annotation of data, ethical issues in Internet data collection, representation and exchange of CMD data, collection and representation of meta-data, tools for corpus storage and maintenance; - social and technical conditions of CMD that need to be taken into account when adapting concepts, frameworks or descriptive categories to CMD analysis; - case studies that exemplify how established concepts and methodologies are applied to sites of online discourse; - ways of doing 'online' or 'virtual' ethnography as a point of contextually rich entry into the study of online activities and communities; - the benefits and challenges of combining various data sets (e.g. logfiles, online participant observation, user observation, statistical information, and user interviews) for specific research questions; - the potential of combining qualitative and quantitative approaches to language data in CMD research. References: - Herring, Susan C. 2001. Computer-mediated discourse. In Deborah Schiffrin et al. (eds.) The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Malden: Blackwell. 612-634. - Herring, Susan C. 2004. Computer-mediated discourse analysis: An approach to researching online communities. In Sasha A. Barab, Rob Kling and James H. Gray (eds.) Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. 338-376. Panel organizers: Jannis Androutsopoulos, German Seminar, University of Hannover, Germany. E-Mail: jannis.androutsopoulos@germanistik.uni-hannover.de Michael Beisswenger, Institute for German Language and Literature, University of Dortmund, Germany. Email: michael.beisswenger@uni-dortmund.de Submission: Short abstracts are invited for 30 min. paper slots (20 min presentation and 10 min discussion). Please send your submission electronically to the contact email above by September 5, 2006. Authors will be notified individually about the further process. Before sending us your abstract, please make sure you will be able to attend the conference, thereby bearing in mind the IPrA conditions, which include a full membership. More information on the IPrA homepage: http://ipra.ua.ac.be/ Joshua Raclaw - PhD student Department of Linguistics Culture, Language & Social Practice University of Colorado at Boulder http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~raclaw/