[Air-L] Call for papers: ICAME 40 pre-conference workshop on corpus approaches to social media

[Daria Dayter]

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 at 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 at unibas.ch
https://english.philhist.unibas.ch/en/persons/daria-dayter/