Open Access

Following the successes of the ninth conference in 2022 held in the wonderful Santiago de Compostela, Spain, we are pleased to present the proceedings of the 10th edition of International Conference on CMC and Social Media Corpora for the Humanities (CMC-2023). The focal point of the conference is to investigate the collection, annotation, processing, and analysis of corpora of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and social media. Our goal is to serve as the meeting place for a wide variety of language-oriented investigations into CMC and social media from the fields of linguistics, philology, communication sciences, media studies, and social sciences, as well as corpus and computational linguistics, language technology, textual technology, and machine learning. This year’s event is the largest so far with 45 accepted submissions: 32 papers and 13 poster presentations, each of which were reviewed by members of our ever-growing scientific committee. The contributions were presented in five sessions of two or three streams, and a single poster session. The talks in these proceedings cover a wide range of topics, including the corpora construction, digital identities, digital knowledge-building, digitally-mediated interaction, features of digitally-mediated communication, and multimodality in digital spaces. As part of the conference, we were delighted to include two invited talks: an international keynote speech by Unn Røyneland from the University of Oslo, Norway, on the practices and perceptions of researching dialect writing in social media, and a national keynote speech by Tatjana Scheffler from the Ruhr-University of Bochum on analysing individual linguistic variability in social media and constructing corpora from this data. Additionally, participants could take part in a workshop on processing audio data for corpus linguistic analysis. This volume contains abstracts of the invited talks, short papers of oral presentations, and abstracts of posters presented at the conference.

The General Data Protection Regulation (hereinafter: GDPR), EU Regulation 2016/679 of 27 April 2016, will become applicable on 25 May 2018 and repeal the Personal Data Directive of 24 October 1995. Unlike a directive, which requires transposition into national laws (while leaving the choice of “forms and methods” to the Member States), a regulation is binding and directly applicable in all Member States. This means that when the GDPR becomes applicable, all the EU countries will have the same rules regarding the protection of personal data — at least in principle, since some details (including in the area of research — see below) are expressly left to the discretion of the Member States. The GDPR is a particularly ambitious piece of legislation (consisting of 99 articles and 173 recitals) whose intended territorial scope extends beyond the borders of the European Union. Its main concepts and principles are essentially similar to those of the Personal Data Directive, but enriched with interpretation developed through the case law of the CJEU and the opinions of the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party (hereinafter: WP29). This White Paper will discuss the main principles of data protection and their impact on language resources, as well as special rules regarding research under the GDPR and the standardisation mechanisms recognized by the Regulation.

The possibilities of re-use and archiving of spoken and written corpora are affected by personality rights (depending on legal tradition also called: the right of publicity), copyright law and data protection / privacy laws. These recommendations include information about legal aspects which should be considered while creating corpora to ensure the greatest archivability and re-usability possible in compliance with current laws. The information compiled here shall serve researchers who plan to create corpora or who are involved in evaluation of such measures as a guideline. This information is not exhaustive or to be considered as legal advice. Researchers should consult institutional legal departments and management before making legally relevant decisions. That said, further legal expertise should be sought if possible as early as project planning phases.

The present paper examines a variety of ways in which the Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language (CoRoLa) can be used. A multitude of examples intends to highlight a wide range of interrogation possibilities that CoRoLa opens for different types of users. The querying of CoRoLa displayed here is supported by the KorAP frontend, through the querying language Poliqarp. Interrogations address annotation layers, such as the lexical, morphological and, in the near future, the syntactical layer, as well as the metadata. Other issues discussed are how to build a virtual corpus, how to deal with errors, how to find expressions and how to identify expressions.