Joint remembering relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, linguistic, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary timescales which we distinguish for analytic purposes with the terms 'coordination', 'collaboration', 'cooperation', and 'culture', so as better to study their interanimation in practice. As an illustrative example of the complementary timescales involved in joint remembering in a real-world activity, we present a micro-qualitative analysis of an interactional sequence in which two members of a fourperson team of video designers crafted a memory- scaffolding tool. In order to find the temporal structure of the crafting of the memory-scaffolding tool, we used software for pattern recognition. The analysis suggests that coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture reveal complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which should be considered as complex phenomenon unfolding at multiple interanimating timescales.
Joint remembering involves people being engaged in
recalling past experiences, which may themselves have been
shared. So the information re-evoked during joint
remembering can be the result of either shared or individual
encodings of the same or similar original event
People engaged in joint remembering tend to mimic each
others’ bodily movements and practices (e.g. eye-gaze,
manual gestures, and body positions) in a sequential rather
than in simultaneous fashion
The temporal dynamics of nonverbal behavioral
coordination seems to be determined by the sequential
organization of the conversations in which joint
remembering takes place. These processes typically occur
over milliseconds and seconds. But remembering together in
conversations also relies on processes which begin to
expand or extend this micro timescale, such as the dynamics
of verbal interactions reflected in cuing attempts, repetitions
and turn-taking
Such re-evoking of past experiences involves the human
capacity for mental time travel: the “faculty that allows
humans to mentally project themselves backwards in time to
re-live stages of their lives, or forward, to pre-live events”
So far, there is still something missing if we want to
understand how people remember together. Joint activities in
which people remember together are also anchored in
longer-term cooperative and accumulative group dynamics
60 between people with a history of interaction, which we can
characterize as typically operating at a timescale t3 of hours
and days. But this timescale stretches, because these
processes typically involve a constant interaction between
internal cognitive resources (such individual biological
memory resources) and external cognitive resources (such
as other people and technology)
Studying the transmission of knowledge and skills that enable the formation of collective memories takes us into consideration of a macro cultural timescale or t4 (fig. 1).
operating across these distinct timescales interact with and complement each other in joint remembering (Bietti & Sutton, in press).
The real-world context we selected to show how these processes interact with each other was a video design studio.
Our data comes from an ethnographic study we conducted in a video design studio in Barcelona in February 2014. The microqualitative analysis focuses on an interactional sequence in which two members of a four- person team of video designers crafted a memory- scaffolding tool. This collaborative activity involved writing a list of the tasks that had been already done by the team of designers as well as the tasks they were to have done by the end of the day. To do so, designers used multiple distributed resources, including linguistic, bodily, and material resources acting in synchrony. In order to find the temporal structure of the crafting of the memory- scaffolding tool, we used software for pattern recognition. The micro-qualitative analysis suggests that coordination, collaboration, cooperation, and culture reveal complementary aspects of interacting to remember, which should be considered as complex phenomenon unfolding at multiple interanimating timescales.
As figure 1 shows, the long-term processes unfolding over
t4 are also affected (and partly constituted) by shorter
processes occurring over t1, t2 and t3. That is, the way
collective memories emerge and are transmitted over longer,
cultural timescales partly depends on the human ability to
coordinate verbal and nonverbal behaviors over t1, the human
capacity to mentally travel back in time jointly in
collaborative social interactions over t2, and on the
diachronic processes of cooperation by which enduring
groups form and function t3. Purely for analytic convenience,
we adopt these four terms to describe processes operating at
each timescale. Below the level of longer-term cultural
processes, we can treat ‘cooperation’ as labeling the most
inclusive, general, and enduring processes by which groups
engage in the diachronic management and negotiation of the
shared past. At shorter timescales, ‘collaboration’ is a useful
term for the active and often deliberate sharing of actions and
experiences for mutual benefit, while in turn the processes of
‘coordination’ can include faster and more dynamic
interactions of which participants need not be explicitly
aware
In this paper we attempt to illustrate how processes 61 fieldwork in February 2014. The overall production of the
New phases of collaborative design projects are built upon
previous ones (e.g. storyboarding => modelling),
transforming creative processes as temporally distributed
activities
For a period of five working days we recorded the activities of a group of graphic and animation designers while they developed a commercial video for Russian television. The setting for this real-world study was an animation and video production studio located in Barcelona, Spain. The stakeholders involved in the making of the commercial were the Russian subsidiary of an American multinational food manufacturing company (client), the Russian branch of a major international advertisement company, a Moscow-based film production studio, and a Barcelona-based animation and production studio, which was where we conducted our commercial lasted from late December 2013 to mid March 2014, when it was delivered to the Russian channels.
The team of designers in Barcelona included: i) a project leader (PL), who was directly in contact with the client in Moscow, and as project director, supervised the overall design process and progress to address client’s requests; ii) a project manager (PM), who led the design process and kept track of the design progress in relation to the deadlines defined by the Moscow-based agency at the beginning of the project; and iii) two designers (D1 and D2) who worked on the 3D animation and had to respond the project leader and project manager’s requests.
Our recordings at the design studio in Barcelona were made with six static (fixed) cameras (4 GoPro HERO 3+ Black, 1 Canon VIXIA HF S21, and 1 Drift HD Ghost), as well as with one head-mounted wearable video camera (Looxie LX2). Because of his leading role, we anticipated that PL would be involved in more interactional sequences compared to the other three members of the team. Hence, we asked him to wear the head-mounted video camera.
The audio and video recordings were transcribed in
detail in ChronoviZ,
The collaborative activity of drawing up the list was oriented to and guided by the past while at the same time aimed at providing guidelines for the goals for what remained of the day. In relation to the past, it was linked backed in time to the goals set by the ‘production timing manifest’ defined by the Moscow-based agency at the beginning of the project (see fig. 4). On the other hand, and in terms of what it set out for the future, after the IS PL used the list to remind the other team members (PM and D1) of the things that they were to have done by the end of the day. Thus, PL used the list to project the design process into the future, and thus, to make predictions and inferences that were useful for anticipating possible outcomes of design decisions. From among the most frequent ISs, we selected an example we believe best illustrates the interweaving of timescales during joint remembering. In this IS (IS370AD) designers PL and D2 were involved in a collaborative activity that involved creating a list (see fig. 3) of the tasks that had been already done by the team of designers as well as the tasks they were to have done by the end of the day. This IS occurred after having a Skype meeting with the Moscowbased film production agency; it lasted 12:14.5 minutes. In the collaborative activity involved in the writing of the list, PL and D2 used multiple distributed resources, including linguistic, bodily, and material resources acting in synchrony.
The collaborative activity of drawing up the list was oriented to and guided by the past while at the same time aimed at providing guidelines for the goals for what remained of the day. In relation to the past, it was linked backed in time to the goals set by the ‘production timing manifest’ defined by the Moscow-based agency at the beginning of the project (see fig. 4). On the other hand, and in terms of what it set out for the future, after the IS PL used the list to remind the other team members (PM and D1) of the things that they were to have done by the end of the day. Thus, PL used the list to project the design process into the future, and thus, to make predictions and inferences that were useful for anticipating possible outcomes of design decisions. Video and audio recordings were coded for linguistic and bodily behaviors, including speech, manual gesture, pointing, writing, typing and mouse-clicking, eye-gaze, head-nodding and shoulder shrugs. These categories emerged from the corpus rather than from the researchers’ prior predictions. The minimum unit of time used for coding the IS was 100ms. For all time points, a binary value was assigned to each behavior of PL and D2 indicating whether they performed that behavior at the particular moment in time.
The analysis of time structure of coded behaviors in the
IS370AD was performed with the help of specialized
software
T-pattern: (( d2,b,speech, ( d2,e,speech pl,b,speech )) (( pl,e,speech ( pl,b,writing ( pl,e,writing
pl,e,gazewl))) pl,b,gazes )) (see fig. 5)
The components of the t-pattern were coded using the following scheme: a) ‘b’ and ‘e’ indicate the beginning (b) and end (e) of events, that is, each instance of behavior was composed of two events; b) ‘writing’ refers to the action of writing down new items on the list (fig. 4); c) ‘speech’ signals the presence of spoken language; d) ‘gazewl’ indicates eye-gaze towards the list; and e) ‘gazes’ signals eye-gaze towards the computer screen.
As an example (fig. 6) to illustrate how PL and D2 remembered relevant information in the process of drawing up the list of things that had already been done related to shoot nine of the commercial, and those that they were to do, we selected one of the occurrences (occurrence #10) of the t-pattern with the lowest critical interval times between events. That is, occurrence #10 was taken from the most recurrent and longest t-pattern that included two completed speech events, one from each of the designers. Although occurrence #10 is an illustrative example, it is representative of the IS, but not of the entire dataset (45+ hours of audio and video recordings). In the first line, D2 explained to PL the changes that he would make to the 3D modeling. PL agreed with him and implied that these changes had already been done (L.2). Before the 2 sec pause in line 3, both designers were looking at the computer screen (fig. 6 a). However, immediately afterwards, PL lowered his gaze direction down towards the list he was writing (fig. 6 b). In line 4, PL completed the utterance initiated by D2 in the previous line, and added information about what was missing while writing it down on the list. During the 6 sec pause, after uttering while writing down ‘animación’ (animation), PL changed gaze direction towards the computer screen. In line 7, D2 completed the utterance initiated by PL the line before. As occurred in 3-4, in lines 6-7 PL and D2 collaborated to remember what had to be done by the end of the day. In the last turn, PL changed his gaze downwards and repeating the item just remembered by D2 ‘galletas’ (cookies) he wrote it down on the list (L. 8).
Joint remembering relies on the successful interweaving of multiple cognitive, bodily, social and material resources, anchored in specific cultural ecosystems. Such systems for joint remembering in social interactions are composed of processes unfolding over multiple but complementary time scales: (i) faster, lower-level coordination processes The temporal structure of multimodal alignment between PL and D2 reflected the key role that the sequential organization of joint remembering played in determining the dynamics of events occurring over t1 of behavioral matching and interactional synchrony occurring at timescale (t1); (ii) mid-range collaborative processes which revoke past experiences in groups (t2); (iii) cooperative processes involved in the transmission of memories over longer periods (t3); and (iv) cultural processes and practices operating within cultural-cognitive ecosystems over evolutionary and historical timeframes (t4).
The micro-qualitative analysis of occurrence #10 has shown how the coordination of linguistic (e.g. repetition of lexical items) and bodily resources (e.g. changes in gaze direction) supported collaborative processes during joint remembering between expert designers at the design studio.
The temporal structure of multimodal alignment between PL and D2 reflected the key role that the sequential organization of joint remembering played in determining the dynamics of events occurring over t1. Joint remembering in the drawing up of the list involved not only the alignment of resources unfolding at t1, but also collaborating to re-evoke what the team of designers had already done, and in the light of what they were still to do before the end of the day. The collaborative processes involved in the completion of the other’s turns (lines 3-4; 6-7) illustrated one of the positive outcomes of the interaction: they could remember what was 64missing and add that information to the list over a t2. The list they were co-creating was used as a tool for the joint remembering of relevant information about the design project between team members in the future. The list was linked to the past too, in that it related back to the ‘production timing manifest’ set by the Moscow-based film production agency. Thus, the list, conceived as a tool for memory scaffolding also relates to a more macro timescale t3 when compared to t1 and t2. However, as we could observe in occurrence #10, joint remembering in the drawing up of the list was also supported by external cognitive resources, transmitted and learnt through ontogeny, such as the creation of written records (list) and the interaction with computers over a macro cultural timescale t4. The latter created the conditions for the emergence of specific cultural ecosystems, such as the video design studio. Further studies in memory research will need to bring controlled laboratory studies and ethnography together in the attempt to explain how multiple timescales and processes are integrated in a synergistic fashion during joint remembering.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the European Commission (MC-IEF 326885) and the Australian Research Council (Discovery Project DP120100187). We thank three anonymous reviewers for their feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.