Cross Media Communication

Current communication technologies tend to be designed and used independently of each other. For example, internet communications, and telephone communications services are all designed and operated separately. This leads to communication media choice but not integration. With the movement of voice communications to the internet, there is a new opportunity to improve integration and a new imperative to understand how best to do this.

In the first case, BT have a number of new integrated communication services in development and plan to trial the first of these in Summer 2006. In the second case, and in conjunction with these trials, we propose a project to look afresh at user behaviours and requirements in this area, using a novel methodology based on analysing conversational records. Hence pairs of users in particular relationships will be approached for permission to record their communications over a fixed period, in whichever medium they occur.

The resulting corpus of communication records will be subject to analyses to identify sequential patterns of communication activity over time and media.

This is a two year project with BT under the Knowledge Transfer Partnership scheme.

This project was led at Surrey by Victoria Land

Publications

Land, Victoria, Lumkin, Mary and Frohlich, David (2008) ‘Conveying Availability and Capability to Communicate in Naturalistic Interaction’, Human Computer Interaction: Culture, Creativity, Interaction, Liverpool John Moores University, 1-5 September 08.

Land, Victoria, Frohlich, David and Lumkin, Mary (2007) ‘Cross-Media Communication Patterns’, The 10th European Conference on Computer Supported Co-operative Work, University of Limerick, Ireland, 24-28 September 07.