Lucas M. Bietti

Sharing memories, family conversation and interaction

Shared memories play a central role in everyday communications. They are usually based on interpersonal and cultural knowledge of a shared past among group members (e.g. family, friends, partners, etc.). These memories are verbally conveyed in everyday conversations in real-world settings. Shared memories are also utilized to create a feeling of connection and maintain a consistent feeling of identity among group members. In family conversations, shared memories function to structure and synchronize the shareable life story of the family as a group. Family members are strategically engaged in processes of remembering and forgetting, which are modelled according to the specific goals of a particular interaction. In these cases, family members construct a sociocognitive system shaped by the physical and social environment in which they are located. This system operates by connecting autobiographical knowledge, which is distributed among family members, but forms part of shared past experiences. By interrelating distributed episodic memories, this sociocognitive system endows family members with the ability to manage distributed autobiographical knowledge. In order to perform this cognitive task, they make use of a wide set of discursive epistemic strategies such as presuppositions and implicatures, justifications, rejections and reminders of shared knowledge of the past. The aim of this article is to show the ways in which a shared past is managed, communicated and negotiated in an everyday family conversation by means of discursive epistemic strategies. The conversation was about five historical dates linked to Argentinean political history.

Joint remembering: Cognition, communication and interaction in processes of memory-making

This article provides a new cognitive- and discourse-based theory to memory research. Despite the fact that a large proportion of studies in memory research are based on investigations of (interactional) cognitive and discourse processes, neither linguistics nor cognitive and social psychologists have proposed an integrative, interdisciplinary and discursive-based theory to memory research. In this article I explore how groups of people who did not know each other jointly coordinate the interlocking of their individual experiences during a period of dictatorship and their self-positioning in the here and now. The interlocking of autobiographical memories is performed by discourse strategies such as agreements and corrections, which are dependent on the participants’ shifting representations of the communicative interaction. The conversations were about personal experiences related to the 1976–83 military dictatorship in Argentina.

Contextualizing human memory

While research methodologies across the social sciences may differ, those social scientists interested in remembering in the “real world” agree that such remembrances occur in particular contexts and that these contexts have profound influences on how the past is remembered. Moreover, if human cognitive activity is the result of contextualized interactions with culturally and historically organized material and social environments (Huchins, 2010), then an explicit description of these contexts is essential toward understanding when and how individuals and groups remember the past at any particular moment (see, for example, the work by the psychologist, Endel Tulving on the encoding specificity principle, Tulving and Thomson, 1973; see also Surprenant and Neath, 2009). This Special Issue integrates cutting-edge research from memory scholars across disparate disciplines who, in general, have remained largely ignorant of each others’ research. Thus, a central goal of this Special Issue is to explicitly examine how different but interrelated contexts (e.g. bodily, intercorporal, psychological, conversational, technological, societal, and political) shape the way individuals and groups remember the past in natural, applied, and experimental settings. To this end, this Special Issue brings together diverse perspectives in memory and communication research—from discursive, social, and cognitive psychologists, to philosophers, cognitive linguists, and technological designers. In doing so, we hope and believe that the sum of this Special Issue will ultimately provide, not only a description of the breadth of memory studies research being conducted across disciplines but also a better understanding of how different contexts shape the way individuals and groups remember the past and help provide the basis for an interdisciplinary model of how the past is remembered. In June 2012, a 3-day workshop was held on “remembering in context” at the Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research (ZiF), Bielefeld University, Germany, to explore the varieties of contexts across disciplines that shape the way individuals and groups remember the past. The

Multimodal alignment during collaborative remembering

This article investigates the roles that interactive alignment of manual gesture, postural sway, and eye-gaze play in small groups engaged in collaborative remembering. Qualitative analyses of a video corpus demonstrate that the coordination of these behaviors may contribute to joint remembering in various ways, depending upon the cognitive and communicative affordances of these behaviors. The observation that these behaviors are different in their nature and their contributory potential to shared remembering is corroborated by the results of a quantitative analysis, which suggests that co-speech gesture, postural sway, and eye-gaze have different interactional dynamics. This supports the conclusion that in order to understand the role of multimodal alignment in the discourse of shared remembering, co-verbal behavior should not be treated as a homogeneous category. Finally, we discuss the potential of combined qualitative–quantitative approaches to inform the interplay of verbal and bodily coordination during interactive memory construction.

Discursive remembering : individual and collective remembering as a discursive, cognitive and historical process

This book integrates discursive, cognitive and social approaches in order to better understand processes of memory-making in real-world activities. It investigates discursive acts of remembering that are related to periods of political violence in Argentina to examine how individual and collective remembering work in both institutional settings (e.g. commemorative speeches in public memorials) and private settings (e.g. family conversations).

Joint remembering in collaborative design: a multimodal approach in the case of a video design studio

Abstract The aim of this paper is to explore the role of joint remembering in collaborative design. Joint remembering sequences are identified on the basis of questions that act as triggers to specific interactive sequences. The sequences are situated in the ongoing collaborative design process, and empirical evidence is provided that illustrates how the interweaving of verbal, bodily, social and material resources supports joint remembering. Three examples of joint remembering sequences in co-design are analysed from a corpus of interactions (45+ hours of audio and video recording), collected during an observational study of a team of four 3D designers working on a TV commercial. This study suggests that questions acting as reminders foster the formation of multimodal remembering sequences (MRSs) that connect multiple timescales over the duration of co-design projects. In the corpus under study, MRSs enable designers to plan future actions and make decisions on the fly.

‘Piercing memories’: Empty spaces in the histories of Argentinean families - personal reflections

This brief article particularly focuses on my ‘piercing memories’ of the 1976—83 military dictatorship when visiting a photography exhibition about the missing people. As an Argentinean born in Buenos Aires 30 years ago, I do not have many personal recollections of the period of dictatorship, yet the photographs of the exhibition act as external memory devices, enabling me to reconstruct and re-encounter both the largely forgotten and unarticulated personal experiences as well as the socially shared memories about what happened under the dictatorship. Despite the lack of first-hand knowledge and direct suffering — I do not have a missing relative - my ‘piercing memories’ of this traumatic period in Argentinean history are still very emotionally loaded and play a central role in defining my identity and personal motivations.

Collaborating to remember collaborative design: An exploratory study

We examine the ways in which members of a small group coordinate their memories, bodies and language in a functional and goal-oriented manner when they are co-designing their dream house and then collaborative remembering that previous interactive encounter. Our analyses show the following: (1) participants structured collaborative design and collaborative remembering sessions in different ways (e.g. linear and sequential vs iterative and hierarchically structured, respectively); (2) higher degrees of knowledge building were temporally synchronized with higher degrees of interactivity during both tasks; (3) collaborative remembering did not only follow the spatial structure of successive elements of the dream-house design session, but it was also proceeded by associations between semantic elements of the discourse; and (4) participants collaboratively remember better what initially generated most joint activity during collaborative design. This research thus contributes to understanding of collaborative remembering processes with respect to a knowledge-rich collaborative task.

Joint Remembering in Co-Design: An Ethnographic Study of Functions and Multimodal Processes

The aim of this paper is to provide empirical evidence that illustrates how the interweaving of verbal, bodily, social and material resources supports joint remembering of relevant aspects of co-design projects during group interactions. Our data comes from an ethnographic study we conducted in a video design studio in Barcelona. The analysis focuses on the role of questions triggering the formation of multimodal remembering sequences (MRSs). This study suggests that questions acting as reminders foster the formation of MRSs. MRSs are supported by an on-the-fly integration and coordination of multiple contextually relevant resources. Our preliminary findings are relevant for the development of new design-rationale systems in HCI that consider such complex dynamics.

Reminders as Interactive and Embodied Tools for Socially Distributed and Situated Remembering

Current approaches to socially distributed remembering maintain that remembering is a fluid action coordinating minds, bodies, and the physical and the social world to accomplish particular goals. That is, the act of remembering is always an active reconstruction of the past in the present. How this act of remembering unfolds is highly dynamic and malleable and is contingent on the means by which the recollection is communicated and the social and material environments in which these processes unfold. These communicative acts of remembering are always embodied, multimodal, and interactive. However, so far, little attention has been paid to the influence that the interplay of multiple behavioral channels have in collaborative remembering in small groups. The aim of this exploratory study is to demonstrate the central role that questions have as embodied and interactive tools for collaborative remembering in two small group multimodal interactions in natural settings. This study suggests that questions acting as a reminder in multimodal activities of collaborative remembering foster the formation of specific types of interactional sequences with their own temporal dynamics.