International Conference on CMC and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities

Specialized corpora of the language of CMC and social media are increasingly vital for the analysis of the “unparalleled and rapidly evolving diversity in terms of speakers and settings” in digital contexts, as well as of “language evolution seen through the lens of user-generated content, which gives access to a number of variants, socio- and idiolects” (Barbaresi 2019: 29–30).

The conference brings together language-centered research on CMC and social media in linguistics, philologies, communication sciences, media, and social sciences with research questions from the fields of corpus and computational linguistics, language technology, text technology, and machine learning. It features research in which computational methods and tools are used for language-centered empirical analysis of CMC and social media phenomena as well as research on building, processing, annotating, representing, and exploiting CMC and social media corpora, including their integration in digital research infrastructures. We adhere to a wide definition of CMC and Social Media, covering various media of digital communication, including email, newsgroups, forums, chat and messenger applications (e.g. WhatsApp), social networks (Facebook, Instagram), gaming platforms, as well as interactions in the communication areas of video portals (YouTube), learning platforms, gaming apps, online games and virtual worlds.