Frameworks of Data Analysis

Having described the research questions which will be perused and articulated the methodological approach to the data collection it is perhaps germane to continue by briefly describing the theoretical basis and disposition that will be used to frame discussions of the research findings and to give strategy to the overall analysis.

Any thorough investigation of the nature of remote gesturing behaviour will find that there are several theoretical viewpoints to which one could subscribe when attempting to explain research findings in relation to relevant theory. As has been discussed this thesis exploits both quantitative and qualitative methodologies as appropriate when answering various questions. In a similar fashion, which is felt to be consistent with the overarching nature of this thesis and its interdisciplinary hybrid methodology approach to the research subject, accounts of gestural action are discussed from several separate perspectives, in the hope that consideration of the different approaches together will further elucidate the data.

One approach to the interpretation of the role of gesture in object-focussed interactions can be informed by an ethnographic sociological perspective. Drawing on the pre-existing CSCW literature, it focuses on the use of gesture as an awareness generating practice (Schmidt, 2002). And considers the various gestural practices or phrases that can be observed as ways for the mediating body to highlight objects for perception and make what Crabtree et al. (2004) describe as “a host of fine-grained grammatical distinctions”. These actions, conjoining utterances (such as verbal prompts and instructions) to specific actions, in turn provide the coordination of tasks, the gestural phrases promoting projectability of intention and action. In an ethnomethodological sense there is also a desire to reject notions that gestures conform to specific categories or classifications of gesture (as equally suggested by prominent members of the psychology community, see Kendon, 1996). Such an approach to the role of gesture allows

one to analyse how a rich grammar of gestural action is implicated in the organization of interaction. This grammar enables participants to „project‟ awareness of the tasks to hand and to integrate their actions accordingly. This consideration of awareness practices promotes the consideration of how collaborative work ecologies are structured and the impact that this has on the workers‟ action‟s situational relevance and intersubjective intelligibility, referred to as the phenomenal coherence of collaborative action.

An additional theoretical viewpoint is to approach the data from a more cognitivist perspective (in line with traditional HCI but falling out of fashion within the CSCW community). Accepting the critique of the use of cognitive theory in CSCW (Button et al 1995) that there is a lack of sociality in its perspective one could be drawn to the theory of Distributed Cognition, which has been proposed as a solution to this very problem. The nature of Distributed Cognition is to consider that cognitive activity does not reside solely within the individual but occurs in the functioning of task artefacts and the interactions of working colleagues. If one considers Hutchins‟ (1995) discussions of Distributed Cognition and descriptions of information representation passing and propagating between individuals and their task artefacts there is a suggestion that in group situations it is only through this flow of information that complex tasks can be achieved. It is therefore arguable that information is easier and quicker to access if the changes in representative state have been kept to a minimum and the translational overhead introduced by any mediating technology is kept to a minimum. This suggests that when remote gesturing is utilised in a collaborative physical task there would be different levels of translational overhead.

Without remote gesturing a helper can see items in a task space but cannot point to them. This means that they need to translate their visuo-spatial instructions into a verbal code which must be transmitted to the party who is in physical proximity to the task artefacts and then be decoded, introducing a significant overhead. In the presence of remote gesturing capability visuo-spatial references are kept intact. The helper can make gestural references (in a myriad of fashions, deictic, structural and dynamic and functional), which are aligned with their collaborator‟s visual perspective on the task. Therefore, references can be kept in a visuo- spatial medium when presented remotely reducing the requirement for complex verbal encodings. This reduction in the amount of processing required for the translation of information reduces the effort required in establishing conversational grounding (Clark, 1996, Fussell et al., 2004). This concept of considering collaborative interactions with a sensitivity towards the process of conversational grounding (Clark, 1996) is not exclusively a distributed cognition issue and consequently draws in a third perspective on understanding remote gesturing, this could in essence be characterised as a linguistic perspective on the analysis. An analysis from a linguistic perspective facilitates a more structural analysis of how gesture use is interleaved with patterns of language use during interaction, focusing on how the grounding of understanding is achieved but without necessarily relying on recourse to cognitive models of the phenomena.

We therefore have different perspectives on how to interpret the data that the research uncovers. From Distributed Cognition we gain the perspective of understanding how information is propagated through a communicative system, this leads us to interpret how system changes will affect the efficiency of information flow between the collaborators. From the ethnographic sociological perspective we can focus on the change in awareness that structural system changes bring between the parties and from a linguistic analysis we develop an understanding of how gesture influences language and supports the grounding of common understanding and communicative intentions. Essentially therefore these approaches allow us to consider a) how information is passed and manipulated and b) how that process influences people‟s understanding of that information, and at each level the thesis seeks to understand how the structure of the gesturing technology is influencing these processes. Therefore gaining a more thorough understanding of the nature of how gesture can be used to structure object- focussed interactions and how this is supported by the notion of the construction of mixed ecologies for communication.

A final caveat for consideration is that these differening perspectives suggest differing methodologies. As discussed in the previous section, the approach taken to data collection is as per the requirements of the research questions posed, but the appropriation of different perspectives on the data gathered is used to draw on the strengths of the different interpretative frameworks, not necessarily their adoptive research methodologies. It is their language and capacity for explanation of different levels of the data that is of particular use not their over- reliance on specific methodologies. Additionally, as remote gesturing tools are being studied, in this context, as generic tools not tied to specific working practices a highly contextualised investigation as befits an ethnography would not be suitable. Hence certain approaches to data collection such as the cognitive ethnography of distributed cognition have not been adopted as this has not necessarily suited the research questions being asked, but the explanatory frameworks it provides have been used to help eludicate some features of the observed data. As the research has become focused on different levels of analysis certain interpretative frameworks (such as the distributed cognition perspective) have inevitably receded from prominence as the focus shifts from observing flows of information to areas less comfortably explained by cognitive terms such as the mediation of awareness and the interaction of gesture and language at a structural level and the implications of this for the design, development and deployment of the remote gesture technologies.

3.5 A Remote Gesture Technology for Experimentation