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，但我们是否有效地沟通？在COVID-19和所谓的“数字化浪潮”中，在线虚拟通信已成为我们日常生活的核心，无论是专业还是私人。随着我们进入后COVID时代，这种数字化转型的可供性表明，我们可以在网上进行专业运营，但需要更好地了解什么已经成为并可能继续成为工作场所的新沟通方式。当前的疫情已成为变革的催化剂，并影响了数字互动内容的制作者和消费者的行为。例如，企业已经改变了与客户的互动。文化组织已经接受了不同形式的数字内容交付，通常由观众共同制作。教育已经大规模采用在线互动模式。在这个我们如何在网上互动发生重大变化的时代，有必要评估虚拟通信是否公平，以及我们现有的分析话语的范式是否适合目的。该项目借鉴了英国和爱尔兰领先研究人员的专业知识，提出了下一代分析框架，用于分析这种新类型的话语，并将这些框架提供给所有艺术和人文研究以及最终用户社区，从而使我们在在线交流中发展平等获取的能力发生重大变化。首先，这个项目旨在探讨虚拟工作场所的沟通，以深入了解有效沟通的潜在障碍。这些可能涉及交互的外部（例如，性别、年龄、地位、种族等）或内部变量（例如，语言变量，诸如彼此交谈或不理解何时适合在谈话中进行“转向”）。我们的目标是探索不仅是什么使成功或失败的虚拟工作场所的话语，但也允许识别与这种成功和失败相关的具体变量。这项研究将是多模态的，既关注说了什么，也关注如何说（例如音高，语调，面部表情，伴随的手势或凝视）。这项研究的结果将导致根据我们的项目合作伙伴的需要创造提高认识的人工制品，其中除其他外，将包括可重复使用的数字对象，如播客、播客;有数字标记的培训介绍（例如主持在线会议;促进在线论坛的公平和多样性;在演示一个过程时模拟一种共存感）。这些提高认识的人工制品（如播客和电子资源）可作为培训材料，以加强虚拟工作场所的沟通，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文化向数字交流平台转变过程中的挑战、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捉和分析多模态交互（例如，如何转录手势并将其与话语对齐），从而使未来的口语研究成为可能。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，这些问题可以由其他研究人员和人文学科的非技术专家访问和（重新）生产，并制作在线档案资产。这一资产将确定共同的和标准化的方法来处理有关语言使用的相关问题，这些问题可以被其他人访问和复制。这将有助于通过为未来的多模态语料库语言学研究建立一个实践社区，为收集、存储、处理和分析多模态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.