“We’ve lost you Ian”: multi-modal corpus innovations in capturing, processing and analysing professional online spoken interactions

Abstract

Online communication via video platforms has become a standard component of workplace interaction for many businesses and employees. The rapid uptake in the use of virtual meeting platforms due to COVID-19 restrictions meant that many people had to quickly adjust to communication via this medium without much (if any) training as to how workplace communication is successfully facilitated on these platforms. The Interactional Variation Online project aims to analyse a corpus of virtual meetings to gain a multi-modal understanding of this context of language use. This paper describes one component of the project, namely guidelines that can be replicated when constructing a corpus of multi-modal data derived from recordings of online meetings. A further aim is to determine typical features of virtual meetings in comparison to face-to-face meetings so as to inform good practice in virtual workplace interactions. By looking at how non-verbal behaviour, such as head movements, gaze, posture, and spoken discourse interact in this medium, we both undertake a holistic analysis of interaction in virtual meetings and produce a template for the development of multi-modal corpora for future analysis.