Call for Papers:
International Conference on CMC and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities

14–15th September 2023, University of Mannheim, Germany

The 10th International Conference on CMC and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities (CMC-Corpora) will be held at the University of Mannheim, Germany in collaboration with the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS). 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.

We invite submissions on CMC-related topics, including but not limited to:

• Development of CMC corpora / social media corpora
  • Building CMC corpora: from data collection to publication
  • Open access data for CMC research: ethical and GDPR issues
  • Annotating CMC data: genres, linguistic aspects, metadata
  • Multimodal corpora
  • Big data corpora
  • Legal issues concerning the sampling, distribution and (long-term) archiving of social media data

• Analysis of CMC corpora / social media corpora
  • Sociolinguistic studies of CMC
  • Discourse analysis of CMC
  • Linguistic characteristics of CMC
  • Multimodal (incl. visual) aspects of CMC
  • Multilingualism and code-switching in CMC
  • CMC in language education

• Natural language processing (NLP) of CMC data / social media data
  • Normalization
  • PoS tagging
  • Anonymisation and Pseudonymisation
  • Lemmatization
  • Syntactic parsing
  • Semantic Annotation

Important Dates

• Submission of short papers and abstracts: 30 April, 23:59 CEST
• Notification of acceptance: Friday, 30 June 2023, 23:59 CEST
• Deadline revised abstract submission: Sunday, 6 August 2023, 23:59 CEST
• Deadline registration for participation: Sunday, 20 August 2023, 23:59 CEST
• Arrival, Get-together: Wednesday, 13 September 2023
• Conference: Thursday 14 – Friday 15 September 2023

Submission

We invite submissions for talks and for posters or software/corpus demonstrations on any topic relevant to the list of themes mentioned above. We invite two types of submissions:

• short papers (2–4 pages, following the existing template, i.e between 800 and 1600 words) for oral presentations
• abstracts (max. 300 words) for poster presentations

Each paper and abstract will be double blind peer reviewed by two or three members of the scientific committee. Authors of accepted papers can present their work at the conference (30 minute time slots: 20 minute talks, followed by 10 minutes of discussion). Authors of accepted abstracts can present their work in progress, early-stage research, software/corpus demonstrations during the poster session. At the start of the conference, all accepted papers will be made available in online proceedings. After the conference, speakers with the best short papers will be invited to submit extended papers for a special issue journal or a volume publication.

Instructions for authors

All submissions have to be written in English and have to be anonymised. The short papers for oral presentations should not exceed 4 pages and the paper format should adhere to the template which you can download HERE for MSWord (40 kB) or HERE for LaTeX (260 kB). The abstracts for poster presentations should not exceed 300 words, bibliographical references not included. All contributions will be collected through the online platform EasyChair under the link https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cmc2023). (If you do not have an EasyChair account, you need to create one first.)