The social web has brought forth various genres of interpersonal communication (computer-mediated communication, henceforth: cmc) such as chats, discussion forums, wiki talk pages, Twitter, comment and discussion threads on weblogs and social network sites. These genres display linguistic and structural peculiarities which differ both from speech and from written text. Projects that want to build and exchange cmc corpora would greatly benefit from a standard that allows the user to annotate these peculiarities in TEI. From the perspective of several corpus projects which aim at building and annotating cmc corpora for several European languages, this panel will discuss how the models provided by the TEI encoding framework may be adapted to the special requirements of cmc genres. The basis of the discussion is a customized TEI schema presented at the TEI conference held in Würzburg 2011 (Beißwenger et al. 2012)1. The panel papers will elaborate on basic features that a TEI standard for cmc resources should include and outline open issues with which further work will have to deal. The overall goal of the panel is to stimulate the discussion within the TEI community about how a standard for the representation of cmc in TEI should look like and what might be a practical and reasonable way to go about creating such a standard. In order to push the development of a general standard for the representation of cmc genres and cmc discourse forward, the papers in the panel will present problem overviews for basic issues in representing cmc features in TEI P5 and outline perspectives as well as first suggestions for the treament of these challenges through modifications and expansions of the encoding framework. Starting from these suggestions, the group is planning to work out feature requests and load them onto the TEI projects page on sourceforge.net.
