Non-verbal, “multimodal” communication is an essential part of human interaction. The Multimodal Computing Project extends the scope of the Linguistic Networks project from purely verbal communication to include gesture, gaze and proxemics, among other things. This field of research is being developed in cooperation with the Speech-gesture alignment and Dialogue and group dynamics projects. In addition to the content-driven question of how non-verbal communication influences the alignment of dialogue participants and enhances communication success, multimodality poses technical problems for storing, managing, annotating, and analyzing heterogeneous data. For this reason, multimodal computing makes use of newly-developed analytical tools provided by eHumanities Desktop and Multimodal alignment corpora: statistical modelling and information management.
