Heath and Jon Hindmarsh

Heath and Jon Hindmarsh:
Configuring Action in Objects: From Mutual Space to Media Space
Two main topics of the article

• How aspects of the material environment are rendered momentarily intelligible in and through interaction
• The ways in which objects provide a resource for the recognition of the actions and activities of others.

How the material world is rendered meaningful

The scene is shaped, rendered intelligible, with regard to the resources provided by John and the sequentially appropriate activity, discovering and displaying the position of the train in question.

Discovering and seeing the object, or rather constituting one aspect of the physical environment in a particular way, engenders sequentially relevant actions by both John, Graham, and presumably at some later date, by the caller himself.

Objects as resource for the recognition of the actions and activities of others

The object and its perception is separated or fragmented from the very ways in which it is rendered noticeable, and thereby stands before the participants as an “objective order of social fact.”

The characterization may consist of a train number or something funny. The characterization informs the ways in which the environment is inspected by the coparticipant and how the particular object is discovered

Nomura and Hutchins

Nomura and Hutchins:
The multimodal production of common ground understandings

Iconic gesture-gesture that is representative of a specific concept
Environmentally coupled gesture-A gesture that takes on meaning as it relates to the environment where it is produced
Juxtaposition of meaning-combining multiple modes of communication to communicate an idea

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slide 4

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Slide 2

Presentation slide 1

6a Detailed analysis example

6a Detailed analysis example

Project 6a Advice

For Wednesday 3/7
Collect at least 15 minutes of video: I would recommend getting more than this though. I would try to find an activity that you could get a half hour of footage from or more. Just because you film for an hour doesn't mean that you will have to use it, but if you only get 15 minutes of footage and 12 minutes of it is hard to hear then you'll have to hope that those last 3 are really really good. By taking more footage you are going to make your life easier. Getting an hour of an interesting activity on film is easy trying to write a paper on 15 minutes of boring or inaudible footage is hard. So get a good amount of data on film choose the best part and use that.


Index: You should have an entry at least every minute, more than that is better though and at some parts you might want to do every 10 seconds. If you include entries less than every minute that will be too infrequent. Also don't do the index based on the minute add entry at the points were something interesting was said or done.

1:05 Ben points at knot
1:30 Kathrine takes rope and starts to instruct Ben
1:45 Ben uses cool orienting gesture at rope
1:55 Kathrine gives bask rope to Ben
2:45 Kathrine uses fictive description of rope
2:55 Points at parts of rope while describing function
3:20 Shows knot to Hutchins

Something like this would be good

Detailed analysis: on a clip or clips that total at least 30 seconds do a detailed analysis like the analysis in project 4. Also include information like gesture orientation and the participants interaction with artifacts. I will post the examples that we looked at in class to help provide some guidance on this