Design and construction of a social media corpus: Influencers’ speech in vlogs

Abstract

This article outlines the creation of a social media corpus of Turkish vlogs on YouTube, aimed at analyzing the translanguaging practices and multimodal communication of Turkish social media influencers. It firstly describes the process of constructing the corpus, including transcription conventions and ad hoc annotation. The article then analyzes the phenomenon of translanguaging, with an emphasis on its prevalent forms and modes. Given the challenges associated with compiling a multimodally rich social media corpus, this paper provides strategies for manually transcribing and annotating linguistic and semiotic features in ELAN software, as well as strategies for managing tier-based annotations for vlog datasets. Additionally, the study presents approaches for handling non-standard linguistic codes and marked occurrences in language contact zones, illustrated through examples drawn from the vlog corpus where Turkish serves as the standard code.