TEI: Macrostructure of CMC Collections and Documents⚓︎9.4.1. Macrostructure of CMC Collections and Documents

TEI: Sequences, Sections, Threads⚓︎9.4.2. Sequences, Sections, Threads

As shown in Example 9.3.2. Attributes Specific to CMC post above, nested threads of posts may be encoded sequentially, while the indentLevel attribute of post is used to keep track of the original nesting depth. This is especially meant for CMC text obtained from a wiki code or HTML source, where it is not always entirely clear whether the indentation information actually reflects a reply action from a user.

In genres where technical reply information is available for each post, reply links can be encoded using the replyTo attribute on post elements, as shown in the second example of 9.3.2. Attributes Specific to CMC post. The network of all reply links will then also form a threaded structure, and visual indentations can be reconstructed from it and need not be explicitly encoded.

TEI: Multimodal CMC⚓︎9.4.3. Multimodal CMC

As explained in section 9.2. Basic Units of CMC, the elements post, u, kinesic, and incident are available to encode textual transcriptions of written posts, spoken turns, bodily activities of avatars, and onscreen activity by users that occur in CMC data; and, as discussed in section 9.3.2. Attributes Specific to CMC post, graphics or other media data within posts are encoded in a post with modality set to written. When two or more of these features occur in a CMC interaction, we can speak of multimodal CMC.

Some basic multimodality is available in many private chat systems such as WhatsApp, where spoken and written posts and media posts containing images or video clips can alternate in the sequence of posts. The following shows the suggested encoding of an extended part of the haircut chat example from above, including a spoken post, several written posts, and a post containing a graphic image (adapted from the MoCoDa2 corpus Beißwenger et al. (eds.) (visited 30 March 2022))

Note that the spoken utterance u represents a speaker turn that was transmitted via an audio channel of the application that is continuously open during a session, whereas a spoken post represents a spoken message that has been recorded in private and been posted to the CMC server as a whole. See section 9.2. Basic Units of CMC.

TEI: Documenting the Source of a Corpus of CMC data⚓︎9.5.1. Documenting the Source of a Corpus of CMC data

The teiHeader of the corpus should contain metadata about the CMC platform(s), e.g. its name, information about its owner (often a company) including their address or location, the URL of the server where the CMC data were collected from, or the filename of a database dump that was used as a source. Metadata about the project responsible for collecting the data and building the corpus, if applicable, should be recorded as well.

TEI: Describing the Source of a CMC Document⚓︎9.5.2. Describing the Source of a CMC Document

A CMC document may be a chat logfile, a discussion page, or a thematical thread of posts as encoded within a TEI element. Among the metadata to be recorded in the sourceDesc of its teiHeader are, if available, its title, author or owner, its URL, the date of its creation and/or the date of its last change (i.e. the time when the last post was added to it).

TEI: Documenting the Sampling of CMC data⚓︎9.5.3. Documenting the Sampling of CMC data

The documentation of how the data were collected, e.g. how it was scraped or sampled from the web, or downloaded from a server, should be recorded in the samplingDecl. Like other metadata, information about sampling should be recorded at the highest level applicable. That is, if the information applies to an entire corpus, the samplingDecl should appear in the teiHeader of the corpus level; if the information is different for each document, it should appear in the teiHeader of the document level texts.

TEI: Participants⚓︎9.5.4. Participants

A listPerson may be used to maintain an inventory of users and bots taking part in a CMC interaction, along with information about them. As with other such contextual information, it may be kept in the teiHeader (where it would occur in a particDesc within a profileDesc) or in a separate document completely. In either case, an encoded post may then be linked to its author by use of the who attribute.

This indirection—using a listPerson, particularly one in a separate file, to store information about the users involved in a CMC interaction—is particularly useful when there is both a need to keep such information locally, and to remove it (e.g., to ‘anonymize’ the data) when the data are published or shared with other researchers.

TEI: Timeline⚓︎9.5.5. Timeline

TEI: Emojis and Emoticons⚓︎9.6.1. Emojis and Emoticons

Emojis are iconic or symbolic, invariant graphic units which the users of social media applications such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and X (Twitter) can select from a menu or ‘emoji keyboard’ and embed into their written posts. Examples are 😁, 😷, 🌈, 😱, and 🙈. An emoji is encoded by one or more Unicode characters which are intended to be mapped directly to a pictorial symbol.

Emoticons predate emojis and are created as combinations of ASCII punctuation and other characters using the keyboard. Examples are :-), ;-), :-(, :-x, \O/, and Oo. They first occurred on a computer bulletin board system at Carnegie Mellon University (Fahlman, 2021) and then became frequent in chat communications during the mid-1980s. An emoticon typically consists of several Unicode characters (from the ASCII subset) in a row, each of which has an intended use other than as part of an emoticon.

Both emoticons and emojis may be simply transcribed as a sequence of characters. As with any other characters, they may be entered as numeric character entities if this is more convenient. (E.g., ❤ might be transcribed as ❤ in any XML document, including a TEI document; see Entry of Characters.)

When the text of a post is being tokenized, e.g. for linguistic analysis, it may be useful to encode the emoticon or emoji as a separate token. In such cases elements such as w or c may be used for tokenization, and the pos attribute may be used to indicate that the encoded string is an emoji or an emoticon. (See 18.1. Linguistic Segment Categories.)

The values of pos in the above examples are from the STTS_IBK Tagset for German (see Beißwenger et al. (2015-09-13)), which includes tags for CMC-specific elements such as EMOASC for an ASCII-based emoticon and EMOIMG for an icon-based emoji.

Sometimes, e.g. when the source of the TEI document was a web page in HTML, the emojis may occur only as an icon graphic in the source. In such a case, they may be encoded using figure. The corresponding Unicode character can then be recorded in the desc element by the encoder if desired.

TEI: Posts with Graphics⚓︎9.6.2. Posts with Graphics

A post in a CMC interaction may contain a graphic in addition to some text or even contain only a graphic (without any text). As explained in 9.3.2. Attributes Specific to CMC post, the modality of such a post should be considered as written. To encode the graphic information, the figure element may be used at the appropriate place.

TEI: Circulation⚓︎9.6.3. Circulation

The following recommendations on how to encode features of the circulation of posts, such as IDs, re-posts (retweets), hashtags, and mentions use X (Twitter) posts (tweets) as an example; this phenomenon is not in any way unique to X (Twitter), however.

In the following example, the type of post (in this case, a tweet) is recorded using the type attribute of post. If it were useful to record a particular sub-categorization of tweet, the subtype attribute could also be used. Furthermore, the original unique identifer of the tweet as supplied by X (Twitter) is recorded as part of the value of the xml:id attribute of the post.

Also in the following example a retweet and its corresponding retweeted tweet are encoded as two separate posts each with its own set of attributes. The post representing the retweet itself does not contain or duplicate the content of the retweeted tweet. Instead it refers to the ID of the retweeted tweet via a ptr in the post content. All original content of the retweet goes in the content of the post element as well. In addition, the hashtags found in the body of the source tweets have been encoded using ref elements (with a type of hashtag), as they are links like any other hyperlink.

Note that in the above example ‘CoMeRe’ style (cf. Thierry et al. (2014)) encoding is used to represent the number of favorites. It would also be reasonable to use a TEI measure element instead of the fs.

TEI: Linguistic Annotation⚓︎9.6.4. Linguistic Annotation

For encoding linguistic analyses of CMC text, we may use the dedicated elements and attributes from the analysis module, which is described in 17. Linking, Segmentation, and Alignment. For example, the tokenization (segmentation into word-like units) of a CMC text should be encoded using the w element.

In many CMC genres, especially in private chat, informal writing abounds including irregular spellings imitating spoken language, omitted word boundaries, and spurious boundaries leading to tokens separated in parts. For encoding these writing phenomena typical of CMC, the TEI attributes norm and join may be used.

TEI: Named Entities and Anonymization⚓︎9.6.5. Named Entities and Anonymization

In the preceding example, pairs of a gap and a supplied element encode the fact that some substring has been removed and replaced with another string for anonymization purposes. Note that in this example, the name and the w elements and their attributes also provide some categorical information about what has been removed. Using gap and supplied to record the anonymization is especially recommendable when the original name or referencing string has been ‘pseudonymized’, i.e. replaced by a different referencing string of the same ontological category (such as replacing the female name Konstanze by the female name Kornelia.). In that case, the markup would be the only place where it can be seen that a pseudonymization has been carried out, as in the following version of the example.