Indicating engagement in online workplace meetings: the role of backchannelling head nods

Dawn Knight, Anne O'Keeffe, Geraldine Mark, Christopher Fitzgerald, Justin McNamara, Svenja Adolphs, Benjamin Cowan, Tania Fahey Palma, Fiona Farr, Sandrine Peraldi

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Amid COVID-19 and the so-called "digital pivot", online virtual communication is at the heart of our professional and private lives. As we move into a post-COVID context, the affordances of the digital turn have shown that we can operate professionally online but there is a need for better understanding of communication in the online workplace. This paper contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of indicators of engagement in multi-party communication online, as evidenced by a corpus-based multi-modal study. It showcases the importance of building naturally-occurring spoken corpora that go beyond written transcription and include annotation of non-verbal behaviour. The work focuses on the incidence, frequency, position, and function of spoken and head nod backchannels, exploring coordination and co-occurrence of these features in online talk. Findings point to a changing profile of how engagement is displayed in online workplace meetings, which appears to be linked to the functionality of platforms.

Original languageEnglish (Ireland)
JournalInternational Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Publication statusPublished - 2024

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Indicating engagement in online workplace meetings: the role of backchannelling head nods'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this