Glossary

(Active) Speaker view: this viewing option uses technology that picks up on microphone usage to highlight the panel of the person who is speaking on a user’s screen.

Automated transcription: uses speech recognition to convert audio to text.

Automatic recording: a feature of virtual meeting platforms that can ensure the recording of entire sessions. This can be set up prior to a meeting to ensure that the entirety of a meeting is recorded from the moment the host logs in.

Backchannels: spoken and non-verbal non-floor-holding responses when a listener responds to the floor-holding message in a conversation.

Beat gestures: are up-down, left-right movements of the hand while speaking. 

Big data mining: refers to extraction techniques performed on large datasets such as Twitter and focuses on retrieving relevant information and patterns. 

Bots: automated programs used to engage in social media designed to imitate humans and interact with web user.    

Breakout rooms: these are smaller group meetings created from the main virtual meeting space. These can be created by a meeting organiser to facilitate, for example, small group discussions.

Cloud recording: this recording option saves recorded files to a platform’s online cloud storage system. Users can access files by logging in to these cloud storage locations. This can make file sharing convenient as it does not require the need to attach large files to email or compress them (see below).

Cluster: in a corpus, these are a group of words or items that occur frequently together.

Chat: in virtual meeting platforms, such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams,this feature allows hosts and participants to send messages in real time to individuals and/or all participants.

Collocation:  is a natural combination of words which co-occur together and are closely associated with each other semantically.  Corpus analysis enables users to identify such combinations.  Examples: blond hair and strong tea.     

Concordance: is a listing of each occurrence of a word or pattern in a corpus or text.  A user can search for an item and a concordance list will give the words surrounding it and therefore identify patterns of co-occurrence.

Continuer backchannel: the most basic form of backchannelling which maintains the flow of discourse and encourages the current speaker to continue with his or her turn at talk.  They provide feedback on how the message is being received.

Convergence backchannel: indicate agreement or convergence. They aid in maintaining good relations and reinforce commonality throughout the discourse.   

Deictic gestures: these are motions using body parts, usually a finger pointing to an object or space.

Embodiment, or embodied action, focuses on the body and includes gestures, facial expressions, laughing, gaze shifts, head movements, and body postures.

Engaged response tokens: are markers of high engagement which communicate emotive signals (e.g. anger, empathy, shock, surprise etc) to the speaker without taking over the turn.  

File compression: due to large video and audio files being created from recordings of virtual meetings, file compression is often necessary as a means of sharing via email, which is limited in its capacity to attach large files. Tools such as WinZip facilitate both compression and unzipping of large files.

Frequency list: in corpus linguistics, a frequency list is a list of words or items presented together with their frequency of occurrence in a corpus. It enables users to identify what words or items occur most and least frequently in a corpus. 

Gallery view: this option shows all participants in a grid configuration on a user’s screen. Each participant is given equal screen space in gallery view and panels will expand or contract as members join or leave a meeting.

Gaze: the direction of orientation that people display through the positioning of their head, particularly their eyes, in relation to their environment.

Gesture: the mode of communication that is achieved through the movement of parts of the body. 

Hybrid meeting: a meeting that has participants who are connected to the meeting virtually and some participants who are situated in the same place.

Information receipt tokens: are markers of response in the discourse where adequate information has been received.  They can assume the role of a discourse marker, signalling the close or shift of a topic.    

Iconic gesture: refers to speech and motions co-occurring where the gesture is used to describe the object being discussed. An example would be a speaker pointing down while saying the word down.    

Keyword: a keyword list involves making a word list for two corpora: 1) the corpus being analysed and 2) a pre-existing corpus.  A keyword list compares both corpora and identifies words or items whose frequency is unusually high when compared with the norm. 

Local recording: a recording option that saves recorded files onto the computer hard drive of the meeting organiser.

Medium: is the material or technology which facilitates communication. In the context of this project, this includes both the hardware and the software (e.g. a computer and Zoom respectively), that are used to create virtual meetings.

Mode: a mode is a means of communicating. Communicative modes include visual, linguistic, aural, gestural and spatial modes.

MP4 file: is an MPEG-4 video file format used most frequently to store video and audio files.  It allows streaming over the internet and can also store subtitles and still images.   

Multi-modality: refers to various communicative resources including gestures, gaze, body postures, body movements, prosody, lexis, and grammar.

Multi-modal corpora: collections of video data annotated along a timeline in order to code multi-modal information to see how multiple modes function together.

Nonverbal behaviour (NVB): Any behaviour excluding speech that is intended or not intended to carry meaning. The distinction from nonverbal communication is that nonverbal behaviour may not carry meaning. For example, a person scratching their head may be behaviour that has no communicative purpose.  

Nonverbal communication (NVC): Behaviour that is not spoken that is intended to carry meaning.

OneDrive: This is a cloud service that gives access to a user to all of their files.  The user can store, edit, protect and share their files with others.  OneDrive can be accessed from anywhere via all devices. 

Otter: a voice transcription software tool developed by California-headquartered tech company Otter.ai. https://otter.ai/signin that uses artificial intelligence to transcribe in real time what is said in a recording. The web-based platform facilitates editing and collaboration on transcripts it calls ‘conversations’.

Panel: This refers to the frame in which a participant is visible on a virtual meeting platform screen.

Pilot Study: often referred to as a ‘feasibility’ study, a pilot study is a preliminary and smaller scale study conducted before a larger quantitative research project and aims to evaluate the potential of the main study.  A pilot study can identify issues of practicality, feasibility and time before the actual study begins.     

Proxemics: The study of space and distance between people.

Prosodic Features: refer more frequently to examples in connected speech of intonation, pitch, stress and rhythm but prosody can also include the speaker’s emotional state, use of irony and sarcasm and emphasis.

Reactions: In the context of virtual meetings, this feature allows participants to react at any point during the meeting with visualisations representing for example, applause or a raised hand to submit a question.

Register: the way a speaker uses language in different circumstances.  It is used to describe meaning across three dimensions: 1) field (nature of activity) 2) tenor (social relations such as power of solidarity) 3) mode (composition of information flow of the message.

Sampling Frame: in corpus construction, a sampling frame or design frame is a rubric that identifies which texts, genres and proportions will be used in a corpus.  Using a sample frame can aid users in assessing how suitable a data set is for analysis and how comparable one corpus is to another. 

Security: This function (in Zoom) allows the meeting host to give options to meeting participants for example screen sharing.   

Sentiment: is a view or opinion held or expressed, can be positive, negative or neutral. 

Screen sharing: This function allows a user to be able to share what is active on their screen in real time with other participants in a virtual meeting.

Spotlight: This function gives a virtual meeting organiser the option to highlight a specific participant’s video during a meeting so that all participants see that person more clearly. This is useful if one speaker is taking the floor and the organiser wishes to give them to be the focus of the meeting.

Speaker View: in Teams or Zoom, speaker view will switch the large video window between who is speaking providing there are a minimum of three participants in the meeting.

SRT file: SubRip subtitle files or SRT files are usually created for generating subtitles for video projects. SRT files are plain text files that include the text in sequence with start and end timecodes to align with video content.

Tier: in ELAN, each annotation is on a row or Tier.  Annotations on a Tier refer to the same category or phenomenon for example Speaker 1’s utterances, head nods pr gestures etc. 

Together mode: In Microsoft Teams, this function digitally places participants in a digitally shared background such as meeting venue or classroom.  

Top tweets: With their relevance based on the popularity, retweets and replies of a tweet, top tweets are the most relevant tweets for a search item. 

Thumbnail image: A smaller representation of a larger image. Use of thumbnail images usually facilitates ease of viewing multiple images at one time, for example, a thumbnail image of a participant may be overlayed on a screen share so that viewers can see both the shared screen and the participant.

Transactional interaction: In the context of a meeting this is where the host or chair goes through the motions of getting the task or objectives of the meeting completed without deviation from the main topic.  

Turn: a turn is the time when an individual speaker is talking. Both face to face and virtual meetings involve alternating turns and turn taking is the manner in which orderly conversation normally takes place: one participant speaks while the others listen.   

Video-mediated interaction: refers to a communicative event, where participants interact live by using a web connection and a medium (e.g. computer, laptop, smartphone) and seeing each other in real time.

Virtual meeting: A meeting in which participants in various locations connect via technology that facilitates audio or audio and video exchange in real time.

Virtual background: virtual background feature in Teams and Zoom allows the user to display an image or video as your background during a meeting.  Used for privacy or to maintain a consistent and professional look. 

VTT file: A text file that is saved in the Web Video Text Tracks (WebVTT) format. It contains supplementary information about a web video, including subtitles, captions, descriptions, chapters, and metadata. Zoom and other platforms save transcriptions in this format.