Video Spaces

Visual Information in FtF:
Static visual cues

• Appearance, clothing, accessories
• Inferences about personality, itelligence, socio/cultural background etc.

Visibal behaviors

• Facial expressions (但是在CMC中，大家有时候根本就不看屏幕，不去注意对方的面部表情)
• Posture (姿势)
• Gaze (I see you), Mutual gaze (We are looking at each other and we know we are looking at each other), full gaze awareness (knowing where the other person is looking at, including mutual gaze)（大家喜欢知道对方在看哪儿）
• Gestures:

Environment

• Proxemics (people's orientation vis a vis one another)
• task objects, events

Gesture

Uses mostly hands, fingers, and arms

Manipulator: Contact with body or object (eg, scratching). Serve non-communicative functions

Beat: Sychronised with the emphasis of the speech

Deictic (直证的)：Arm/hand used to point at existing or imaginary object

Respresentational:

Emblem: Movement with precise cultural/social meaning

Audio-only media space

MY NOTES

Hindus et al. (1996)

Hindus, D., Ackerman, M. S., Mainwaring, S., & Starr, B. (1996). Thunderwire: a field study of an audio-only media space, Proceedings of the CSCW 1996 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, (pp. 238-247). NY: ACM Press.

Literature suggests that "audio, especially good-quality audio, would have a sufficient communicative capability for an interesting and useful shared media system" (p. 239).

Thunderwire (p. 240):

• It was a purely audio medium. Except for an “on” light, it had no other visual interface or cues.
• The audio was high quality, such that users could easily distinguish one another’s voices as well as overhear background sounds. The sound quality made it possible to hear everything one might hear sitting in a person’s office, including private vocalizations, phone calls, bodily noises, and background noise.
• All messages were public on Thunderwire.
• System use was fluid. People could connect or disconnect themselves from Thunderwire any time ‘they wished, simply by flipping a switch.
• The act of connecting or disconnecting was indicated only by a barely audible click. In fact, there was no way to know exactly who was listening without asking.

Access Thunderwire:

• Group within same company
• Group was already cohesive, young temporary staff
• Group seated within 100 feet of each other
  

Problems with Thunderwire:

• Knowing who is present
• low disturbance audio
  
• automatically turning off mic when phone calls come in
• private conversations
  

Add modalities (e.g. visual cues to presence)
Keep to audio-only interface

• development of norms
• eg. Annoucing oneself, signing off so people know who is present
• eg. signing off before taking personal calls
• audio cock-tail parties

Somewire
(Signer et al, CHI1999)

Somewire=audio system underlying THunderwire
Researched 4 Somewire interfaces

• Fader: audio controls
• Vizwire: social presentation
• Thunderwire:one/off+volume
• ToonTown: tangible interface

Aoki, P. M., Romaine, M., Szymanski, M. H., Thornton, J. D., Wilson, D., & Woodruff, A. (2003). The mad hatter's cocktail party: a social mobile audio space supporting multiple simultaneous conversations. Proceedings of CHI 2003 (pp. 425-432). NY: ACM Press.

Rodenstein & Donath (CHI 2000)

Rodenstein, R. & Donath, J. S. (2000). Talking in circles: Designing a spatially-grounded audioconferencing environment. Proceedings of CHI 2000 (pp. 81-88). NY: ACM Press.

Talking in Circles:
The best one!!!
Audio as a way to overcome limitations to text-based chat (typing ability)
But audio chat has two major shortcomings

Small Group Discussions
Do we want to provide cues to facilitate audio-only communication
Or , do we

How do we evaluate the effectiveness of this system?

Cambience 【Video ->audio】
(Diaz-Marino & Greenberg, CSCW 2006)

Simulate informal comm environment in IM

Informal Comm in CMC

1. Kraut, R. E., Fish, R.S., Root, R.W., & Chalfonte, B.L. (1990). Informal communication in organizations: Form, function, and technology. In S. Oskamp & S. Spacapan (Eds). Human reactions to technology: The Claremont
Symposium on applied social psychology (pp. 145-199). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

2. Isaacs, E., Walendowski, A., Whittaker, S., Schiano, D. J. & Kamm, C. (2002). The character, functions, and styles of instant messaging in the workplace. Proceedings CSCW 2002 (pp. 11-20). NY: ACM Press.

3. Zhao, D. & Rosson, M.B. (2009). How and why people Twitter: The role that micro-blogging plays in informal communication at work. Proceedings of GROUP 2009 (pp. 243-252). New York: ACM

How to facilitate Informal Comm in CMC?

Media tools:
1. PARC

2. CaveCat: show availability by door icon, which can be improved by adding a senser on the door.

3. VideoWindow (Bellcore)

4. Cruiser: late 80s

5. Autocruiser: system supplied availability

6. Montage: (~1993): Multimedia Glances for Distributed Groups
1) A small window
2) The window can fade in and fade out
3) One person can interrupt no matter the other person is busy or not
4) User can type in the status to add more features
5) User can leave notes on the other person's desktop
6) Users can share image and make marks on it

Emotion in CMC

In 1960s, an assumption that dominates psychology believes we cannot convey emotions without nonverbal language.

Politeness:

People strive to maintain one another's face (面子)

1. 积极的面子positive face = affinity, connection, solidarity (what I like, I want other people to like)----self-worth

2. 消极的面子negative face = individual agency, autonomy, power differential in a context()

e.g., hedges, questions vs. commands

face threat: getting something from someone

Some studies indicate that text CMC is less polite than FtF communication

1. Sussman et al: less social presence

2. Brennan & Ohaeri:

But... Do we need to be polite?

What exactly is "Flaming"?

When you talk online, people start to attack each other. That's why this topic becomes popular in 1980s-1990s.

In email, we don't have the opportunity to collect evidence of whether the other person has understood correctly.

Re-Conceptualizing Flaming

O'Sullivan & Flanagin (2003)

Their model considers sender's interpretation, recipient's interpretation, and third party interpretation.

Faces and Emotions

Face percpetion is a highly develped visual skill

1. Infants prefer to look at faces from shortly after birth

2. Capacity to perceive the unique identity of a virtually unlimited number of different faces

Ability to recognize emotions from facial expression

Facial Expressions

1. Involve whole face: eyes, eyebrows, forehead, mouth (especial lips and corners), cheeks, ears, nose

2. Wide variety: blinks, winks, smiles, frowns, furrowed brows, wrinkled up nose. etc.

3. Multiple factions:

a. Conveying affective information

b. Conveying attention, comprehension (feedback)

c. Conveying agreement/disagreement

d. Elaborating/modifying verbal message

Smile is primarily a communicative tool, instead of merely showing one's own emotion

Emoticons and Messages

Walther and D'Addario (2001)

~Emoticons may communicate social information like nonverbal cues do in FtF

~At the same time, emoticons are intentional like language but unlike some nonverbal cues

~Prior studies show that emoticon use ranges from about 10 to 75% messages, depending on forum

~But, no research on how they are understood

Study: compare relative importance of

Emotions in CMC

Often used to help the reader how to interpret your message.

Technology changes grounding

Exactly how people achieve common ground depends up the details of the technology available.

Affordances of media ----change----> Needs/costs of:

Copresence___________________ formulation
Visibility _____________________production
Audibility____________________ reception
Cotemporality_________________ understanding
Simultaneity__________________ start-up
Sequentiality__________________ delay
Reviewability__________________ asynchrony
Revisibility____________________ speaker change
____________________________display
____________________________fault
____________________________repair


Applying grounding theory to technology design

Face-oriented camera (only show user's face)
Head-mounted camera (a camera on user's head)
Scene camera (showing the whole scene of workplace)

*Research--Puzzle task
--worker's display.................................helper's display
--Conditions:
..--Shared visual information
..--No shared visual information

Examining sequential structure

Discourse coding scheme
-helper utterances
-worker utterances
-worker actions
-joint worker utterances
[13 total codes, relatively high inter-rater reliability]

Effects of actions on discourse
-Actions serve as subsitutes for language
---verifying references
---

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---
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Process vs content grounding
-coordinating content
-convertino extend tis to group work, espcially collaboration on complex tasks
-content common ground through selectively sharing information

How doe sthe tool design facilitate frounding?

Jeremy and Jamie's talk

COMM 6910 Feb. 2, 2010

How to design a mobile tool (SMS, IM) that leaves some room to users. People can share the information that they want to share when they want to share.

Feb.2, 2010

Conversation Structure

1. FtF conversations are orderly

* People speak on turns, linear, a question and an answer, the third person is hard to jump in a conversation. Conversation shifts between A and B.

Gaze: people would look away when they think

Conversation analysis nees to be actual conversation, it cannot be those ones developed in lab.

Two theories of turn-taking

Rules approach (conversatonal analysis)
1) observational methods
2) try to describe behavior of communicators

Signals approach (psychology)
[what would be the signal of doing certain things]


"Rules" Model