Digital Humanities Day #3

Lockdown measures to curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in countries around the world have caused a dramatic shift with online communication replacing face-to-face communication to a substantial degree. Indeed, the Corona pandemic has seen the creation of new and expanded contexts for online interactions, with an increase in the use of online communication technologies via web conferencing tools such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. These tools are being utilized by an increased number of users, for a greater range of purposes, and more frequently than previously. However, the potential benefits of online communication are diminished by the fact that online communication cannot fully replace face-to-face interaction, since non-verbal cues are not as clearly discernible and there is an overreliance on verbal information. This poses a particular problem for turn-taking, since the signals speakers use to indicate when they are about to finish their contribution are absent.

In this poster, we present the Language of Lockdown Corpus, a representative corpus of online spoken language in 20 varieties of English around the world, currently being compiled by researchers in Hamburg and Bochum. We detail the processes of data collection, data annotation and data storage, and discuss logistic and ethical issues which arise in curating a corpus of this size. In addition to this, we illustrate how this corpus can be productively used to document and analyse changes in language and communication during the Corona pandemic, using turn taking as an example.