“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 facilitat- ed 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 fea- tures 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, pos- ture, 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.