Spent some time pocking around to find good tools for qualitative analysis in OSX. The winner is: HyperRESEARCH. At the end, it is the most stable, and up-to-date. The bad part is that is a commercial product, although they offer a free teaching version for teaching purpose.

The other candidates were:

TAMS: The TAMS (Text Analysis Markup System) Analyzer is an open source qualitative analysis system for OS X and GNUstep (Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc.). Screenshots, documentation, binaries and sourcecode available.

jATLAS: ATLAS (Architecture and Tools for Linguistic Analysis Systems) is issued from an initiative involving NIST, LDC and MITRE. ATLAS addresses an array of applications needs spanning corpus construction, evaluation infrastructure, and multi-modal visualization. The ATLAS framework provides an architecture targeted at facilitating the development of linguistic applications. The principal goal of ATLAS is to provide an abstraction over the diversity of linguistic annotations. The abstraction, which expands on Bird and Liberman’s Annotation Graphs (see the history below), is able to represent complex annotations on signals of arbitrary dimensionality.

Anvil is also a free video annotation tool. It offers frame-accurate, hierarchical multi-layered annotation driven by user-defined annotation schemes. The intuitive annotation board shows color-coded elements on multiple tracks in time-alignment. Special features are cross-level links, non-temporal objects and a project tool for managing multiple annotations. Originally developed for Gesture Research, Anvil has also proved suitable for research in Human-Computer Interaction, Linguistics, and many other fields. As it is dependent on Java Multimedia Framework is a bit picky in the supported codecs.

I worked today on a formalisation of the co-referenced actions coding schema. I used the three levels model introduced yesterday to mark how such actions are generated. I made some simple assumption on how to disambiguate between similar cases and how to order them:

[1] Actions weight more than words. In other words, commitment is expressed by actions more than with words. Agreeing at verbal level does not imply agreement at knowledge level.

[2] Actions planned and executed by different agents weights more than the same actions planned and performed by the same agent.

[3] Grounding at knowledge level would require completing the three phases: Plan, Commitment, Feedback.

I was looking today for a good tool to code some of the raw data we have got from the students work on the COTRAS platform. Patrick suggested ATLASti and MacSHAPA for the mac. After a while I passed by this product: HyperRESEARCH, that seems to do the job.

HyperRESEARCH™ enables you to code and retrieve, build theories, and conduct analyses of your data. Now with advanced multimedia capabilities, HyperRESEARCH allows you to work with text, graphics, audio, and video sources — making it an invaluable research analysis tool.

My supervisor explain what is a script in CSCL, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning.

[link]

Today, I started generalising a possible coding schema for operationalise the co-referenced actions. It is based on the idea that to be co-referenced, two persons have to go through three stages in a sequential order: [P] Plan (the user states his/her intentions or ideas); [C] Commitment (the user act to some aspects to the task); [F] Feedback (the user comment on a planned or committed action).

def. [P] -> [C] -> [F]

I found a nice picture on the CIIP report on the architecture for schools. The interesting stuff is that interactivity can be stimulated also using the proper division of the space. This may be an interesting link to follow for the preparation of our workshop CAIF (Collaborative Artifacts Interactive Furniture).

Nice link from Giles on how to spot the location of the GSM antennas in the UK. Apparently, the database, maintained by the telecommunication authority, contains the location of the GSM antennas places on the UK ground.

The ‘Sitefinder’ Mobile Phone Base Station Database is a national database of mobile phone base stations and their emissions. The database is managed by the Office Of Communications.

I need to define an operational coding schema for co-referenced actions. Some of the initial schema we found is as follow:
Schema 1_ A: Refers to Action
B: Acknowledge A
A: Perform Action

Schema 2_ A: Refers to Action
B: Perform Action

Schema 3_ A: Refer to Action
A: Perform Action
B: Acknowledge A

Schema 4_ A: Refer to Action
B: Perform Action
A: Acknowledge B

Schema 5_ A: Perform Action
B: Acknowledge A

These schema may compute in a CRA (co-referenced action index) that can be related in some way to the Shared Understanding. One simple way to relate this may be to look at performances. A more complex view can be a complex combination of Redundancy, Amount of Speak, Division of Role, Time Delay.

I have to look at pragmatics to define possible coding schema for extracting co-referenced, co-intentionality, and perspective taking index. All this parameters reflect on how people feel the process of the communication, their meta-representation of the ongoing communicative process. Three problems need to be faced:

1- how to assess in real-time the representation of the problem of the person without influencing his/her representation of the whole process (Heisemberg Indetermination’s Principle).
2- how to relate a single representation to the global representation of the ongoing communication ( A -> B = A <- B ?). 3- How people can work spatially, communicate and commit to other's statements? Can we invent a task that make this more operational?