A case study of collaborative storyboarding in an animation studio grounded this investigation of visual discourse---discourse about and with visual displays. The focus was on a problem occurring during a 40-minute task between the head storyboard artist and his junior colleague in reviewing a rough, conceptual storyboard. The research investigated the role of different semiotic modalities produced by the artists', i.e., speech, gesture, and drawing, in mediating spatial (frames of reference) and motion (action and path) representations and inferences from the storyboard. One aim was to determine if particular modalities were used to represent particular spatial and motion ideas. / Both qualitative discourse and quantitative analyses were undertaken to associate the individual discourse modality in co-occurring external representations (speech, gesture, or drawing), with spatial and motion ideas required to understand the storyboard. The results showed that (a) most modalities did not consistently or uniquely represent specific types of spatial and motion ideas, (b) representations frequently demonstrated a mismatching between spoken and gestured or drawn ideas, (c) spatial representation in particular required the artists to represent specific goal domains as contexts that determined the frame of reference and local sense of the representation, and (d) a more complex drawing style was used at the beginning of the problem than in the latter solution stages. / These findings are discussed in terms of the artists' (a) flexibility needed to traverse between 2-D and 3-D imagined worlds requiring the representation of different spatial coordinate systems, (b) handling of the modalities in visual discourse as supporting this flexibility, and (c) strategic use of drawing styles to assist inferring 3-D dynamic action from an incomplete, 2-D, static storyboard. The study demonstrates the importance of considering activity goals and interacting semiotic modalities as contributing to the knowledge needed to represent and infer space and motion. These findings are significant to research on the knowledge and tools used to infer space and motion from static visual displays in authentic collaborative design activities, and have implication for research on technologies and environments supporting collaborative visual thinking in design settings.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.85131 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Blatter, Janet |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Educational Studies.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002227961, proquestno: AAINR12811, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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