Interactional variation online: harnessing emerging technologies in the digital humanities to analyse online discourse in different workplace contexts

我们比以往任何时候都更紧密地联系在一起，但我们的沟通是否有效？在新冠肺炎和所谓的“数字轴心”中，在线虚拟交流已经成为我们日常生活的核心，无论是职业交流还是私人交流。随着我们进入后COVID时代，这种数字化转向的启示表明，我们可以在网上进行专业操作，但需要更好地理解已经成为并可能继续成为工作场所沟通的新方式的东西。目前的大流行已成为变革的催化剂，并对数字互动内容的生产者和消费者的行为产生了影响。例如，企业已经改变了他们与客户的互动。文化组织已经接受了不同形式的数字内容交付，通常是由他们的观众共同制作的。教育已经看到在线互动模式的大规模采用。在这个我们在线互动方式发生重大变化的时代，有必要评估虚拟交流是否公平，以及我们现有的分析话语的范式是否符合目的。这个项目利用英国和爱尔兰的领先研究人员的专业知识，提出了分析这种新型话语的下一代分析框架，并将使这些框架适用于所有艺术和人文研究以及最终用户社区，导致我们发展在线交流机会平等的能力发生阶段性变化。首先，本项目旨在检查虚拟工作场所沟通，以深入了解有效沟通的潜在障碍。这些因素可能与互动的外部变量(例如性别、年龄、地位、种族等)或内部变量(例如语言变量，例如互相谈论或不理解何时应该进行对话)有关。我们的目标不仅是探索虚拟工作场所话语中成功或失败的因素，而且还允许识别与这些成功和失败相关的特定变量。这项研究将是多模式的，既关注所说的话，也关注它是如何说的(例如音调、语调、面部表情、伴随的手势或凝视)。这项研究的结果将产生提高认识的人工制品，它将基于我们项目合作伙伴的需求，除其他外，将包括可重复使用的数字对象，如播客、播客、数字标记的培训演示(例如，主持在线会议；在在线论坛上促进公平和多样性；在演示过程时模拟一种共同存在的感觉)。这些提高认识的人工制品(如播客和电子资源)可以作为培训材料，加强虚拟工作场所的交流，突出任何突出的公平问题。这些材料将帮助我们的项目合作伙伴了解向数字交流平台的文化转变中的挑战、细微差别和新规范以及最佳实践。我们的第二个目标是通过开发适当的技术协议来捕获和分析多模式互动(例如如何转录手势并使其与话语对齐)，从而使未来能够对口语进行研究。我们的目标是发展标准化的方法来处理有关语言使用的问题，这些方法可以由人文学科的其他研究人员和非技术专家通过制作在线档案资产来获取和(复制)。这一资产将确定处理有关语言使用的相关问题的通用和标准化方法，其他人可以使用和复制这些方法。这将有助于通过为今后的多模式语料库语言研究建立一个实践共同体，为有关收集、存储、处理和分析多模式数据的研究实践提供信息。

We are more connected than ever before but are we communicating effectively? Amid COVID-19 and the so-called 'digital pivot', online virtual communication has been placed at the heart of our daily lives, both professionally and privately. As we move into a post-COVID context, the affordances of this digital turn have shown that we can operate professionally online but there is a need for a better understanding of what has become, and is likely to remain, a new way of communicating in the workplace. The current pandemic has acted as a catalyst for change and has impacted on the behaviours of producers and consumers of digital interactional content. Businesses, for example, have changed their interaction with customers. Cultural organisations have embraced different forms of digital delivery of content, often co-produced by their audiences. Education has seen large-scale adoption of online modes of interaction. In this time of substantial change to how we interact online, there is a need to take stock of whether the virtual communication is equitable and whether our existing paradigms for analysing discourse are fit-for-purpose. This project draws on the expertise of leading researchers in the UK and Ireland to propose the next generation of analytical frameworks for analysing this new type of discourse and will make these frameworks available to all arts and humanities research and end user communities, leading to a step change in our ability to develop equality of access in online communication.Firstly, this project aims to examine virtual workplace communication so as to gain depth of insight into the potential barriers to effective communication. These may relate to external (e.g. gender, age, status, ethnicity, etc) or internal variables (e.g. linguistic variables such as talking over one another or not understanding when it is appropriate to take a 'turn' in conversation) of the interaction. We aim to explore not only what makes for success or failure in virtual workplace discourse, but what also allows for the identification of specific variables associated with such successes and failures. This study will be multi-modal, focusing both on what is said and also on how it is said (e.g. pitch, intonation, facial expression, accompanying gesture or gaze). Findings from this study will lead to the creation of awareness-raising artefacts which will be based on the needs of our project partners and will include, inter alia, reusable digital objects such as podcasts, vodcasts; digitally badged training presentations (e.g. chairing online meetings; fostering equity and diversity on online fora; simulating a sense of co-presence when demonstrating a process). These awareness-raising artefacts (e.g. podcasts and e-resources) can serve as training materials to enhance virtual workplace communication, to highlight any salient equity issues. These materials will aid our project partners in understanding the challenges, nuances and new norms, as well as best practices, in the cultural shift to digital communication platforms.Our second aim is to enable future research into spoken language by developing appropriate technical protocols for capturing and analysing interaction multi-modally (e.g. how to transcribe a gesture and align it with an utterance). Our goal is to evolve standardised ways of approaching questions about language use which are accessible and (re)producible by other researchers and non-technical experts in the Humanities, with the production of an online archive asset. This asset will identify common and standardised ways to approaching pertinent questions about language use which are accessible and reproducible by others. This will help to inform research practice in relation to gathering, storing, processing and analysing multi-modal data by building a community of practice for future multi-modal corpus linguistic research.