Computer-Mediated Communication SIG

Mission statement

The internet and social media have given rise to a broad range of new communicative genres which are subsumed under the term computer-mediated communication (CMC) – genres such as chats, forums, text messaging (SMS, WhatsApp), interaction on wiki talk pages and in blog comments, via Twitter, on social network sites, and in multimodal 3D environments.

While the term computer-mediated communication might be used broadly to describe all kinds of communications that are mediated by digital technologies (such as text on web pages, written exchanges in chats and forums, interactions with artificial intelligence systems, the spoken conversations in internet video meetings), for the purposes of these Guidelines we use the term to apply to forms of communication that share the following features:

  • They are dialogic;
  • They are organized as interactional sequences so that each communicative move may determine the context for subsequent moves (typically taken by another interlocutor) and may react to the context created by a prior move;
  • They are created and displayed using computer technology or human-machine interfaces such as keyboard, mouse, speech-to-text conversion software, monitor or screen and transmitted over a computer network (typically the internet).

Since 2013, the SIG Computer-Mediated Communication has brought together experts from the field of corpus linguistics, DH infrastructures and researchers from linguistics and related disciplines working on the language of CMC to discuss best practices for the representation and annotation of original CMC data using TEI schema customizations.

Based on several schema customizations from the community and as a result of a working group with members of the SIG and the TEI Technical Council (2020-2023), in July 2024 the TEI Consortium included a new chapter “Computer-mediated communication” into the P5 Guidelines for Electronic Text Encodung and Interchange. As of version 4.8.0 of the guidelines it is therefore possible to fully rely on the TEI framework as a standard for encoding corpora and other data sets of CMC genres in XML/TEI. The status of the new CMC chapter in the TEI guidelines is that of a basic encoding schema. When encoding and exploiting CMC corpora, scholars would typically wish to annotate even more than just basic structures, e.g. linguistic and semiotic features particular to CMC discourse, and also capture metadata in a way that suits for the specific requirements of research on CMC and social media. The mission of the SIG as of 2025 is therefore to discuss experiences with and further customizations of the TEI-P4 CMC schema building on resources from various research and encoding projects from the community.

Activities

The next meeting of the SIG will be held as part of the 25th annual conference and general meeting in Kraków/Poland on September 19, 2025, 11:00-13:00 MET as a hybrid meeting. Participation is possible on site or remote (via zoom). If you are interested to take part in the meeting please contact the conveners for the zoom link. Previous meetings and panels of the SIG have been held, e.g.,

  • at the TEI Conference in Rome/Italy (2013)
  • at the CMC Corpora Conferences in Dortmund/Germany (2014), Rennes/France (2015) and Ljubljana/Slovenia (2016)
  • as part of the 4th DARIAH-EU VCC meeting in Rome/Italy (2014),
  • at the TEI Conferences in Lyon/France (2015) and Vienna/Austria (2016)
  • at the international colloquium “Integrating a new type of language resource into the Digital Humanities landscape” in Essen/Germany (2017)

A documentation of the work and activities of the SIG (including TEI customizations and schemas for CMC) can be found in the SIG space of the TEI wiki.

Conveners

Michael Beißwenger, University of Duisburg-Essen

Harald Lüngen, Institute for the German Language (IDS), Mannheim/Germany

Wiki space and mailing lists

For exchange on the issues and tasks listed above, the SIG uses the talk pages in the TEI wiki and a mailing list: