Margaret H. Szymanski

Revisiting the visit:: understanding how technology can shape the museum visit

This paper reports findings from a study of how a guidebook was used by pairs of visitors touring a historic house. We describe how the guidebook was incorporated into their visit in four ways: shared listening, independent use, following one another, and checking in on each other. We discuss how individual and groupware features were adopted in support of different visiting experiences, and illustrate how that adoption was influenced by social relationships, the nature of the current visit, and any museum visiting strategies that the couples had. Finally, we describe how the guidebook facilitated awareness between couples, and how awareness of non-guidebook users (strangers) influenced use.

The mad hatter's cocktail party: a social mobile audio space supporting multiple simultaneous conversations

This paper presents a mobile audio space intended for use by gelled social groups. In face-to-face interactions in such social groups, conversational floors change frequently, e.g., two participants split off to form a new conversational floor, a participant moves from one conversational floor to another, etc. To date, audio spaces have provided little support for such dynamic regroupings of participants, either requiring that the participants explicitly specify with whom they wish to talk or simply presenting all participants as though they are in a single floor. By contrast, the audio space described here monitors participant behavior to identify conversational floors as they emerge. The system dynamically modifies the audio delivered to each participant to enhance the salience of the participants with whom they are currently conversing. We report a user study of the system, focusing on conversation analytic results.

Sotto Voce: Facilitating Social Learning in a Historic House

This study examines visitors’ use of two different electronic guidebook prototypes, the second an iteration of the first, that were developed to support social interaction between companions as they tour a historic house. Three studies were conducted in which paired visitors’ social interactions were video- and audio-recorded for analysis. Using conversation analysis, the data from the use of prototype 1 and prototype 2 were compared. It was found that audio delivery methods were consequential to the ways in which visitors structurally organized their social activity. Further, the availability of structural opportunities for social interaction between visitors has implications for the ways in which the learning process occurs in museum settings.

Would You Like to Do it Yourself? Service Requests and Their Non-granting Responses

Many organizations have inherently conflicting goals when it comes to customer service. On the one hand, they must provide their customers with the service they desire to ensure a large, loyal patronage. On the other hand, the cost of providing those services can become very expensive and thus curtail an organization’s profitability. In order to remain solvent, organizations must keep the cost of providing customer service within bounds. Almost inevitably, this will result in a circumscription of services; some customer requests simply cannot be granted.

The Conversational Role of Electronic Guidebooks

We describe an electronic guidebook prototype and report on a study of its use in a historic house. Visitors were given a choice of information delivery modes, and generally preferred audio played through speakers. In this delivery mode, visitors assigned the electronic guidebook a conversational role, e.g., it was granted turns in conversation, it introduced topics of conversation, and visitors responded to it verbally. We illustrate the integration of the guidebook into natural conversation by showing that discourse with the electronic guidebook followed the conversational structure of storytelling. We also demonstrate that visitors coordinated object choice and physical positioning to ensure that the electronic guidebooks played a role in their conversations. Because the visitors integrated the electronic guidebooks in their existing conversations with their companions, they achieved social interactions with each other that were more fulfilling than those that occur with other presentation methods such as traditional headphone audio tours.

Producing Text through Talk: Question-answering Activity in Classroom Peer Groups

Abstract This conversation-analytic study examines how students in peer groups interact and organize their own literacy learning activity to accomplish written question-answering tasks based on their reading of a story. Written question-answering tasks, especially those designed for literacy learning, require students to answer questions as an academic task—to “do answering.” A turn-by-turn analysis of the students’ talk-in-interaction shows that for the students examined in this study, “doing answering” involves two sub-activities. One sub-activity, question-answering, is to produce a substantive answer to the question as one would do in ordinary conversation. Then to fulfill the requirements of the written task, a second sub-activity, answer-framing, involves moving the answer from its conversationally-framed grammar to a written grammatical frame. The findings reveal the various methods or patterned ways in which the question-answering and answer-framing sub-activities are accomplished through the students’ peer group talk-in-interaction.

Organizing a remote state of incipient talk: Push-to-talk mobile radio interaction

This study investigates the organization of conversational interaction via push-to-talk mobile radios. Operating like long-range walkie-talkies, the mobile radios mediate a remote state of incipient talk; at the push of a button, speakers can initiate, engage, disengage, and reengage turn-by-turn talk. Eight friends used the mobile radios for one week; 50 of their conversational exchanges were analyzed using conversation analytic methods. The findings describe the contour of their conversational exchanges: how turnby-turn talk is engaged, sustained, and disengaged. Similar to a continuing state of incipient talk in copresence, opening and closing sequences are rare. Instead, speakers engage turn-by-turn talk by immediately launching the purpose of the call. Speakers disengage turn-by-turn talk by orienting to the relevance of a lapse at sequence completion. Once engaged, the mobile radio system imposes silence between speakers’ turns at talk, giving them a resource for managing a remote conversation amid ongoing copresent activities. (Continuing state of incipient talk, conversation analysis, reengaging and disengaging talk, mobile radio communication.)*

Practical strategies for integrating a conversation analyst in an iterative design process

We present a case study of an iterative design process that includes a conversation analyst. We discuss potential benefits of conversation analysis for design, and we describe our strategies for integrating the conversation analyst in the design process. Since the analyst on our team had no previous exposure to design or engineering, and none of the other members of our team had any experience with conversation analysis, we needed to build a foundation for our interaction. One of our key strategies was to pair the conversation analyst with a designer in a highly interactive collaboration. Our tactics have been effective on our project, leading to valuable results that we believe we could not have obtained using another method. We hope that this paper can serve as a practical guide to those interested in establishing a productive and efficient working relationship between a conversation analyst and the other members of a design team.

Integrating local and remote worlds through channel blending

Recent advances in ubiquitous technology have greatly changed the way people stay connected. We conducted an in-depth video shadowing study to observe how close-knit groups use all the technology at their disposal to stay in touch and share their lives. We observed a pattern of related behaviors that we call channel blending, the integration of interactions and content over multiple channels into one coherent conversation, often including both local and remote participants. Channel blending is the opposite of multitasking in that it involves merging many lines of focus into one, rather than switching attention between them. We discuss ways technology could better support this emerging style of multichannel content-sharing and communication.

The guidebook, the friend, and the room: visitor experience in a historic house

In this paper, we describe an electronic guidebook prototype and report on a study of its use in a historic house. Supported by mechanisms in the guidebook, visitors constructed experiences that had a high degree of interaction with three entities: the guidebook, their companions, and the house and its contents. For example, we found that most visitors played audio descriptions through speakers (rather than using headphones or reading textual descriptions) to facilitate communication with their companions.