Dear colleagues, we invite your submissions to a pre-conference workshop "Corpus Approaches to Social Media" which is to take place on June 1, 2019, in Neuchatel, Switzerland, before the main ICAME 40 event. Submission deadline: December 15, 2018 Submission link and the full CFP text: https://icame40.ch/program/pre-conference-workshops/ Workshop conveners: Sofia Rüdiger & Daria Dayter Workshop Description Language-centered research on online interactions has been steadily gaining momentum since the days of early Web 2.0. Corpora creation in this field, however, offers a set of new challenges that pre-internet or even Web 1.0 researchers did not have to reckon with. This workshop will therefore focus on the collection, analysis, and processing of corpora of single- and multi-modal, synchronous and asynchronous communication on different social media platforms and channels and the challenges connected to these research endeavors. We invite submissions from scholars working on a range of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SMS and WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram, gaming chats, blog comments sections, wiki discussions, and YouTube comments. The contributions will describe various aspects of data collection, annotation, processing, and exploitation of machine-readable corpora for research in the humanities. The workshop thus brings together language-centered research on interactive social media in linguistics, communication studies, media studies, and social sciences with research questions from the fields of corpus and computational linguistics, language technology, and text analytics. We intend to create a forum to address the following challenges of corpus-based studies in the realm of social media: - Ethical issues of accessing and harvesting data and making it available as a part of “open data” initiatives, especially in multimodal analysis when removing an image impoverishes the analysis - Legal issues of accessing and harvesting data, and the question of our social responsibility as scientists outweighing legal concerns (cf. the case of Fivethirtyeight sharing a corpus of Russian trolls’ tweets) - Difficulty obtaining data which is often very rich in personal information and subjects therefore being reluctant to donate their WhatsApp chats or Facebook conversations - Technical challenges of collecting and storing corpora (including how-to talks, sharing experiences in using available tools such as Trendalyzer, Tweet Visualiser, twXplorer, DiscoverText, Twitter StreamGraph, WebAnno, CATMA) - Annotation of social media corpora: inter-coder reliability; reconciling the need for tailor-made annotation with the standardization drive - Lemmatization, POS tagging, syntactic parsing, and named entity recognition Call for Papers We welcome contributions which address the issues mentioned above as standalone subjects, but also invite presentations approaching these matters within the framework of concrete corpus studies of social media, for example, in the realm of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, translanguaging and code-switching, applied linguistics, multimodality, as well as descriptions of social media registers. *Abstracts of max. 500 words (including references) should be submitted online via www.icame40.ch/login <http://www.icame40.ch/login>*. The deadline for abstract submission is 15 December 2018. Notification of acceptance will be sent out by January 10. If you have any questions, please contact the workshop conveners under daria.dayter@unibas.ch best wishes, Daria Dayter and Sofia Rüdiger Dr. Daria Dayter Department of English - University of Basel Postdoctoral Assistant Nadelberg 6, room 15 CH-4051 Basel / Switzerland Tel: 0041 - 61 - 2 07 27 82 Email: daria.dayter@unibas.ch https://english.philhist.unibas.ch/en/persons/daria-dayter/