Activities & artifacts: the dual nature of image-making in communicative practice

  • Authors:
  • Jaime Snyder

  • Affiliations:
  • Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2012 iConference
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Selected findings are presented from a preliminary qualitative investigation of image-making as information-driven communicative practice. Ad hoc visualizations are images spontaneously created during the natural flow of a conversation (e.g., napkin drawings). The activity of drawing in these situations is an informal information sharing practice occurring within an interactive, dynamic context. A discourse-oriented methodology is described for the direct observation and analysis of drawing during face-to-face conversations. Analysis of fifteen video-recorded conversations used an iterative, grounded theory approach to multimodal social interactional analysis. The dual nature of drawing as both information artifact and communicative activity is discussed in terms of contrasting affordances exploited during specific drawing episodes in the data. These findings have implications for image representation and the development of visually enabled information and communication technologies.