Computer-Mediated Communication: who is

mediating what?

John BatemanUniversity of Bremen

Three areas of inquiry for this talk

• the role and nature of the communication itself

• the role and function of the ‘user-receiver’

• the position and role of the computer

CMC

Person

Computer

Person

orTool

Person Computer

HCI

Computer asMachine

adapted from: Höller, Heinzpeter: "Kommunikationssysteme - Normung und soziale Akzeptanz", Braunschweig 1993, S. 107 ff.

Medium“from tool to medium”

StartingPoints

Some Motivations

• ‘anytime’/ ‘anyplace’ interaction

• re-use of materials for wider audience

• re-purposing of materials

Person

PersonPersonPerson

Person

Computer

Person Information Re-UseInformation Re-purposing

I: The role and nature of the

communication itself

• explore ways of characterizing activity that occurs in computer mediated communication systems

• analyses in CMC have tended to concentrate on the group activities from a social perspective

Time

Same Different

Same

Synchronous/ProximateTechnology-enhancedclassrooms

Shared physical workspace:

e.g.Video taped lectures in asingle location or anetworked computer lab.

Place

Different

Synchronous/Disperse

Networked classrooms

Asynchronous/Disperse

Virtual Classrooms in ALNenvironments

Web Telecourse

Johansen 1992

Classification of situations according to time and place

Approaches from Linguistics:e.g., register theory

• The language that occurs in a situation is critically responsive to that situation

– features of the situation systematically call for particular kinds of features in the language

– features of the language are one of the main means by which speakers judge their communicative situations

ContextLanguage:

semantics,grammar,phonology,...

Spokenjoint, interactive achievement

specific audiences

Writtenpermanent record

more anonymous audiences

Contrasting forms

“In your reply to David’s message at 21-Jan-2000 09:21:12 you said “that sucks”, but this is not what you said at 21-Jan-2000 09:20:30 to Pete.”

“Hey, you just told Pete it was OK.”Attention and

possible disagreementmarker

Temporalproximity

markerAddressees Participant+

ContrastPoint of

disagreement

Contrasting forms

“In your reply to David’s message at 21-Jan-2000 09:21:12 you said “that sucks”, but this is not what you said at 21-Jan-2000 09:20:30 to Pete.”

“Hey, you just told Pete it was OK.”

Consequences...

• interaction is a very exact thing!

• the degree of success or otherwise of a CMC-system that attempts to support relatively free interaction will be directly related to the extent to which it has managed to simulate the ‘immediacy’ and the ‘placement’ of expression normal with speech

II: The role and function of the

‘user-receiver’Computer PersonPersonPerson

learning,distance learningEducator StudentcommunicationInteractants Interactants

business Company ClientCSCW Workers Workers

II: The role and function of the ‘user-receiver’

Computer PersonPersonPerson

learning,distance learningEducator Student

communicationInteractants InteractantsbusinessCompany Client

CSCW Workers Workers

SIMULATION

Student Student

Person

Person

PersonPerson

Person

Computer

CustomizationInformation tailoring

Person

Respecting the needs of the receiver is relatively new!

• how appropriate documents are for their readers is one focus of development within Graphic DesignDocument DesignInformation Design this century

• still underestimated to what extent the reader needs to be considered

• (note: parallel but largely independent of UI-work)

The functional turn

• With schools of graphic design such as the Bauhaus and the Swiss School, the role of communicative purpose and function was brought into typography and document design

• this has also developed, as with CMC, alongside emerging technologies...

gannets

Plumage white,save the wing quills,which are dark brown, not black as usually stated.The fledgling blackish-slate, spotted white.Immature till the third or fourth year,and recognized by the dark brown,chiefly on the back, wings, and tail,which colour diminishes season by seasontill at maturity reduced to the brown of the wing quills.

ADULT: White, black wing-tips,yellow nape.

JUVENILE: Grey,gradually becoming white over 5 years.

The plumage is white with a tinge of buff on the head and neckand dark brown, almost black, wing-tips.Immatures are first dusky all over,later piebald or white sprinkled with dark spots.

1924

1972

1996

Redistribution ofInformation acrossmodalities andacross time

Integrating Words and PicturesStudies show that designers must help readers:• search for the information they want in prose

and graphics• make sense of it once they find it• construct a coherent interpretation of the

prose and graphics• generate connections between the words and

the pictures• put the information to personal use.

‘Rhetoric’ for organising information

• something that is perceived as necessary for good document design: and particulary web design and online interaction...

• but how to systematise and teach it?

The GEM project:‘Genre and Multimodality’

(http://www.gem.stir.ac.uk)

Stages in Analysis• Content analysis: what ‘facts’ are being

communicated?• Rhetorical analysis: what is the RST

structure?• Layout analysis:

– what layout elements are there`?– what is their hierarchical structure?

• Does the layout support the rhetoric?

Relation between content, rhetorical organisation and layout

• examine the page layout

• examine the rhetorical structure of the information as presented

• look for interrelationships

Example relation: motivation

Replace spark plugsone at a time

so you don´t get thewires mixed up.

(Honda Civic car manual)

NUCLEUS SATELLITE

Rhetorical Structure Theory: RST

motivation

Replace spark plugsone at a time

so you don´t get thewires mixed up.

NUCLEUS

SATELLITE

presents an action in which thereader is the actor and which is `unrealized´ with respect to the context

comprehending the satelliteincreases the reader´s desireto perform the action presentedin the nucleus

EFFECT: the reader´s desire to perform the actionpresented in the nucleus is increased.

A simple case

Layout Structure: blocks

Rhetorical Structure of the Page

The artic explorerwears lots of warmclothes to protecthim from the cold

elaboration

windproof top

balaclava

woolen underclothing

trousers

bootsmittens

‘material’

joint

Layout Structure of the Page

G

the page

A B C D E F

Content Analysis

quality of vision how the eye workswhere it is quality of hearingfunction of ear spots appearance of ear spotsappearance of coat function of appearance of coatfunction of canine teeth function of molarsfunction of claws behaviour of claws when walking

RST analysis

Tiger: pic body parts

Tiger: mouth(pic)

canines molars

elaboration

elaboration

back of ears(pic)

white spotsfunction

backgroundhearingcoat

purpose

functionof stripes eyes

means

coating

claws(pic)

claws retract why

purpose

attributes

weightheight

dietlength

maturityseason

lifespanyoung

gestationbodytail

relationships comparisons

elaboration

background background

joint

joint

joint

joint

Page Layout Elements

Layout Structure

A

A1 A2 A3 A6 A7 A8A4 A5 A9

a a a a a ab b b b b b

DrawingIntermediateCaptionTextblock

eyes ears coat mouth teeth claws

Types of element:

Bad Documents and Bad Products• When people experience difficulty in understanding

either texts or technology, they tend to blame themselves more often than they should.

• This has potentially serious long-term consequences:– leading them to believe that they are incapable of dealing

with complex technology– leading students (of any age) to believe that they are too

incompetent to understand the subjects they study in school or the topics and technologies they must learn on the job.

The ‘illusion of knowing’

Poorly designed textbooks can create more than one kind of problem for readers. ... at times we may overestimate how well we understand. ... College students... who read texts in which experimenters had “planted” contradictions failed to notice the contradictions. Suprisingly, after having read contradictory material, students rated themselves as feeling ‘very certain’ they understood the text. In fact, students had overlooked the contradictions and had answered many of the comprehension questions incorrectly.

cf. Schriver (1997:226)Glenberg, Wilkinson and Epstein (1982)Memory and Cognition 10(6):597-602.

Person

III:The position and role of the

computer

Computer Person

Person

Exchange of Data mediated by Computer

Computer PersonData Data

Exchange of Data mediated by Computer

Data DataComputer

Person

Person

Person

Pers

on

Example: the Dartbio information system:Artist Biographical Data

Authors

A

A

A

A

A

A

A

A

A

Automatic and Semi-automatic

information extraction

Data

StructuredKnowledge

Base

User

User InterfaceInformation

Retrieval

Visualisationand Natural Language Generation

Example: the ILEX system:Interactive Web-based Museum Explorer

(University of Edinburgh)

MuseumCurators

Form-basedinformation

inputinterface

Data

StructuredKnowledge

Base

Visualisationand Natural Language Generation

User

Web -br ow

s er

InformationRequestHandler

University of EdinburghILEX System startup page

Automatic webpage generation from an annotated data base

New roles and functions for the information ‘preparer’?

Computer Person

PersonPerson

learning,distance learningEducator Student

communicationInteractants InteractantsbusinessCompany Client

CSCW Workers Workers

DataStructuredKnowledge

Base

Symbolic Authoringe.g., Drafter project http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/projects/drafter

Agile project http://www.itri.brighton/projects/agile

• Symbolic authoring allows a ‘writer’ to produce texts via a specification of the texts’ intended meaning rather than directly as text

• A text generation component then converts these specifications into natural texts

• Advantages: – the text generation component can produce a

variety of texts from the same information– e.g., variations in style and selected language– non-variation can be enforced, e.g., terminology

Multilingual Document Production

• Producing documents from a single knowledge base source for different language communities

• Can either be:– translation based: text-in, text-out– generation based: authored content-in, text-out

• Can also be spoken (Verbmobil Project: http://verbmobil.dfki.de)

New Technologies and CMC

• New technologies (such as Natural Language Processing) are changing the role that the computer can take on when mediating information

• There are already significant applications where information presentation is largely taken over...

USA Today: development of the “Weather Page”

1981 1990 1994

“Conclusions...”• There are many places where linguistics and

computational linguistics will come together in CMC

• Understandings of both the ‘rhetoric’ (more written organisation) and ‘interaction’ (more spoken) are crucial

• One of the most important pieces of ‘information design’ to be done is visualising the interaction process in a way that builds on how spoken language already works