http://dlandinichi.blogspot.com/2011/02/paper-reading-10-enabling-beyond.html
Emotions Experienced by Families Living at a Distance
Hyesook Kim & Andrew Monk
University of York
CHI 2010 Doctoral Consortium 10-15 April 2010 Atlanta, Georgia
Summary
Another brief paper, Emotions Experienced by Families Living at a Distance, discusses the results of a series of interviews using what is called the "Probe Method" and not further explicitly elaborated upon in the paper itself.
The subjects of the study appear to have been families split between England, which is of course where York is located, and in the Republic of Korea, which I infer to be where Hyesook Kim's background lies. Two interviews were conducted with each. In the first, participants were interviewed about their contact with their families, typical communication between family members, shown examples of the types of technology the researchers hope to develop, and the probes were left. These probes were objects with associated activities:
(The following is copied directly from the paper)
* Spirit of Oracle cards with an invitation to choose a few that elicit thoughts or feelings about your family by writing on the back of the card.
* A digital camera to take photos relating to prompts such as "something you like to share".
* Diaries in which to write about happy or unsuccessful conversations.
* Draw "A journey with my family" where you were happy.
(This ends the quotation)
The second interview followed the first by a minimum of a week, with delay not constant across individuals. It focused on the results of the probe activities, which sometimes were still being performed as the interview was conducted.
The interviews produced 134 pages of transcripts, which were mined for interesting data by text search. The paper concludes with nine examples of interactions, both positive and negative. These are apparently simply to illustrate themes rather an attempt to provide quantitative information and I see no need to reproduce the list here. It can be found by looking up the paper, which is #34.
Discussion
The connection of this specific paper to computer science seems to me to be somewhat tenuous. Certainly I am not trying to suggest that this project isn't up that alley, but this data collection makes no use of uncommon or cutting edge technology and what is being developed isn't presented in this paper itself. Rather, "The themes that emerged are rich resources for design, which will be the focus of another paper. The final step will be to use these findings, with the understanding from a literature survey, to propose and build communication devices for case studies". Now, that paper could be very interesting - and this is a course of action I endorse, not having enough information to formulate a detailed one of my own - but those devices are not the focus of this paper.
With that said, I do like this line of inquiry. I'm a long distance student myself, although of course the great Centennial State is a little bit closer to Texas A&M than Korea is to York, and until someone gets around to inventing the transporter tools like those this team proposes to develop are very relevant to my interests.
The ultimate dream in long-distance communication.
and the original source is of course the original Star Trek.
Bonus picture: This is what I got when I tried to log in to ACM to access the paper.
It let me read it without logging in, this time, but this is somewhat concerning.
It sounds like a pretty interesting study to me, although I agree that I'd rather hear about what they plan to do with the results, and what impact their findings will have on whatever kind of communication device they want to develop.
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