During the winter term 2023/24, a series of activities dealing with the topic of “digital interculturality” will be held at the University of Potsdam. One of them is the workshop “Facial gestures in video-mediated intercultural communication: From transcription to analysis” by Prof. Ulrike Schröder and Dr. Flavia Fidelis from the University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.

The on-site workshop will deal with transcription methods of facial gestures in interactions happening in digital spaces. All students and researchers interested in video-mediated communication, multimodality, and gesture studies are warmly invited!

When? December 7, 2023, 2:00-6:00 pm
Where? Campus Neues Palais, room 1.08.0.56

Ulrike Schröder is a Professor for German Studies and Linguistics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Her research focuses on intercultural communication and pragmatics, cognitive and interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, and  gesture studies. She is co-coordinator of the project „Multimodal coordination of video-mediated intercultural interaction”, which comprises three Brazilian and three German universities and is funded by CAPES and DAAD.

Flavia Fidelis is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Potsdam, with a fellowship granted by PROBAL-CAPES. She holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical and Descriptive Linguistics from the University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Her research focuses on online and synchronous interactions, particularly examining mechanisms of social affiliation and interactional alignment during opening sequences. Her research also explores multimodality in digital platforms, drawing from the principles of Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis.

Workshop description:
Embodied resources have been revealed to play a critical role in intercultural communication when they co-occur with speech. In video-mediated communication, talking heads often communicate as if they are detached from their bodies, which calls for a reevaluation of the so-called ‘multimodal turn’ within these ‘fractures ecologies’. In visual and corporeal terms, interlocutors tend to rely more heavily on facial gestures to orient themselves and others, compared to face-to-face interactions in physical settings. Sometimes, these gestures take on a different form, as evidenced by the allocation of turns through gaze. This observation raises several methodological questions, as the transcription of facial gestures in online interactions has received limited attention thus far. In this workshop, we aim to present methods for integrating the annotation of facial gestures, as well as incorporating images of these gestures into the transcription of online interactions. Drawing from sequences of intercultural interactions, we will also demonstrate the relevance of these methods for achieving a holistic understanding of the co-construction of meaning within virtual environments.

References

  • Bavelas, Janet Beavin (2022). Face-to-face dialogue. Theory, research, and applications. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Bavelas, Janet & Chovil, Nicole (2018). Some pragmatic functions of conversational facial gestures. Gesture 17(1), 98–127.
  • Due, Brian L. & Licoppe, Christian (2020). Video-mediated interaction (VMI): Special issue on the multimodal accomplishment of VMI institutional activities. Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality, 2020. https://tidsskrift.dk/socialinteraction/article/view/123836
  • Dix, Carolin (2022). GAT 2 trifft das International Sign Writing Alphabet (ISWA): Ein neues System für die Transkription von Multimodalität. In: Schwarze, Cordula & Grawunder, Sven (eds.), Transkription und Annotation gesprochener Sprache und multimodaler Interaktion. Konzepte, Probleme, Lösungen. Tübingen: Narr. 103– 131.
  • Mlynár, Jakub; Gonzales-Martínez, Esther & Lalanne, Denis (2018). Situated organization of video mediated interaction: A review of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies. Interacting with Computers 30(2), 73–84.

For more information, please contact Milene Mendes de Oliveira & Mario Antonio Tuccillo
at redico@uni-potsdam.de