Much has happened since last I wrote… Hugo has grown incredibly fast and it’s amazing to follow his development!

Together with my family, I have also left Umeå for Linköping, and we are trying to adjust to life in southern Sweden. When I get back from maternity leave, I will finish my thesis at a distance from here.

Apart from delivering this general update, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that this year’s EUROCALL conference is to take place next week. Similar to last year, there will be a Virtual Strand to the conference. Since I’m on maternity leave, I won’t blog (which I did last year), but I will try to participate at a distance instead. Read more on the conference website and hope to see you there!

There is still time to submit proposals for a conference here in Umeå on “Identity and Power in the Language Classroom”, co-organized by some colleagues at the Modern Languages Department. One of the suggested themes concerns the relationship between identity, language and medium, which should interest some of the readers of this blog. What a wonderful opportunity to visit Umeå and get a glimpse of the midnight sun (the conference is on June 11-12)! You better hurry, though – deadline for submission of abstracts is in two days… Read more here.

My presentation in the PC Minitrack was in a section on Conversation at Work, where all papers dealt with multitasking in one way or another. For example, Peter Scupelli presented an experimental study where it was investigated how interactional behaviour changed when using a modified version of IM with more awareness cues added (PVIM). What they found was that increased awareness of other participants’ task-related activities made work processes more effective in that participants more easily could focus on the task. The question of awareness is a relevant issue also in my research. For example, the design considerations that my study has resulted in suggest that the individual involved in conversational multitasking should have the opportunity to set the level of intrusiveness for different types of communicative alerts, and, importantly, the other interlocutors should be made aware of his/her chosen settings. This would give them an indication as to how soon a reply could be expected.

Another presentation dealing with awareness strategies was given by Tony Bergstrom and focused on the “conversational clock“. This is an innovative solution where participants in face-to-face conversation can see their participation visualized in real-time in the shape of a clock on the table in front of them. This presentation caused much discussion concerning practical applications. As the results showed, people preferred looking at each other over staring at the table in front of them… Further, it was discussed what the effects might be of receiving this type of information. Will it make participants more hesitant to speak and conversations more stilted?

From a language learning perspective, I have found the visualizations provided by the FlashMeeting videoconferencing platform quite intriguing. They clearly show participation rates, and who is contributing the most in the different modes. I have considered showing the visualizations to the students to make them aware of this – active participation is after all a prerequisite for language learning – but so far I have hesitated to do so. Maybe I should give it a try?

One thing which was striking in the presentations of the Persistent Conversations minitrack at HICSS was the wide variety of types of materials analyzed. For example, some presentations dealt with oral conversations, others with IM or blogs, and yet others with images. This led to some constructive discussions on definitions, theories and methodologies. Stephanie Woerner, in her presentation on conversations in IM, defined a conversation as a sequence of messages in which no two messages are separated by more than 5 minutes” (Isaacs et al. “The character, functions, and styles of instant messaging in the workplace”). In asynchronous media, this is of course far from true, but pauses in conversation may be longer than this also when using synchronous media such as IM. If I had used this definition in my analysis of conversational multitasking, some of the replies would have appeared too late to count as part of the conversation, whereas an analysis of their content reveals that they certainly should be included.

On a similar note, I think that we might have to re-evaluate the notion of conversational coherence. An often cited source at the conference was Susan Herrings article on “Interactional Coherence in CMC“. Here, it is stated that the two main obstacles with text-based chat reported in the research on CMC are lack of simultaneous feedback and disrupted turn adjacency. I am not so sure that either of these is really considered a problem if you ask people who have some experience with text chat; they know about the conventions that apply and how to deal with the fact that CMC is not like f2f interaction. However, if working with technologies that depend on sequentially structured turn-taking, such as audio software, this is all the more relevant. Also, Herring actually notes that the incoherence in text-based CMC might be one of the reasons why it is so popular – this component of her article was not referred to at the conference, though.

(Some of the papers mentioned here can be accessed from http://www.visi.com/~snowfall/HICSS_PC_History.html.)

I’m now back from the HICSS conference and will try to summarize some of my impressions in the next couple of posts. This conference covers a wide span of topics, ranging from E-Government and Digital Economy to Knowledge Management. The minitrack in which I presented myself, “Persistent Conversation”, provided many interesting presentations, and I would like to mention a few here. Fernanda Viegas won the best paper award for her presentation on Wikipedia, where she and her colleagues have looked at the development of Wikipedia over the last few years with a special focus on whether anarchistic or collaborative strategies seem to be steering the development. They found that the collaborative features seem to prevail, and analyzed the “Talk” pages associated with each Wikipedia entry as an example of this. Another presentation which I found very interesting was Johann Sarmiento’s, in which collaborative learning in the VMT concert chat system was discussed (this was the system we discussed during the workshop too). Here, the notion of “bridging” was introduced to refer to the strategies that students employed to create coherence between the different modes of the platform as well as between different episodes of interaction.

The track dealing with “Collaboration Systems” also fit well with my research. Here I found relevant presentations in minitracks such as “Virtual work, teams and organizations”, “Advances in teaching and learning technologies” and “Cross-cultural issues in collaboration technology”. For instance, Daphne Dekker presented results from a study where informants were asked to exemplify effective and ineffective strategies used in virtual team work. The behaviours they found were divided into 11 categories, such as “active participation” and “pro-social behaviour”, and can be used to increase effectiveness in online collaboration.

I also attended some presentations in the “Virtual Communities” minitrack, where the topic of building trust online was discussed. For example, Cristen Torrey and colleagues had conducted a study of online coordination of aid to the victims of the Katrina hurricane, and found that small blog communities developed trust more rapidly than large forums, but also did not last as long.

More examples of presentations will follow in the next few posts here as well as in the HUMlab blog.

In preparation for the HICSS conference which I’ll be attending next week, I have been thinking about the difference between using real-time data (like screen captures) and log files when analyzing online interaction. In the paper I will present (based on the same study that I presented in HUMlab not long ago), I argue that valuable information is lost if we only focus on log files. Since in this study I had access to information about current activities of the informant, I was able to find explanations for temporal aspects such as delay. Without this information I might have concluded that delay is the result of the informant being slow at typing, when, in fact, she is engaged in other simultaneous activities.

Apart from presenting the paper, I will also give a brief presentation at the Persistent Conversation workshop. This should be a valuable session, since participants are asked to apply their theoretical framework to the same chat system. Again, I am confronted with the question of what different types of analyses can be carried out depending on what data you have access to. Here, the real-time data does not capture the communicative environment of the informants in front of their computers, but rather the real-time interaction in the online environment. Nevertheless, there are some important differences, for example concerning the type of information you get regarding the communicative intention of the conversational partners (information about when others are typing is available in real-time but not in the logs). However, in this specific case, the log files are also quite useful, since they link the different modes (text chat and white board) and allow for detailed revisiting of the relationship between the two. Depending on your research agenda, a combination might be to prefer. I look forward to discussing this further!

Some other topics I hope to get an opportunity to discuss at HICSS include:

• Tools for analysis and visualization of complex data
• Ethnography and design
• Ethical and legal concerns
• The notion of communicative affordances and its applicability
• Plans for my future study

I am really looking forward to this trip, both because I think it will be valuable to my research, and, admittedly, because I long for some vacation in a warmer climate! Updates to be expected. Aloha for now!