YouTube as text: Spoken interaction analysis and digital discourse

Abstract

This chapter explores the context of a study of multimodal interaction on YouTube that draws upon tools for the analysis of spoken interaction. While the various forms of multimodal CMC clearly differ from spoken interaction, the degree to which they resemble it is an important issue. The framework used in this study is based on the framework for analysing the structure of spoken interaction developed at Birmingham University in the 1970s. The remainder of this chapter discusses how this framework was used in a study that aimed to uncover evidence of language and intercultural learning in comments on YouTube videos. A language-culture related comment is a comment oriented towards the substantive topic of the Initiation that the video represents, and a sequence of comments represents a development of this topic. The number and length of exchange sequences are, in this sense, indicators of the semantic breadth and depth of interaction on the topic of a video.