CA researchers who approach institutions like the police can get responses which vary from warm encouragement to outright rejection, with most cases falling somewhere in between. It’s up to the researcher to establish good relations with their contacts, abide by their requirements, and be sensitive to the legal and technical constraints that box in the recordings. But if they do come away with usable data, that can be an exceptionally valuable source of information about how the police work. Here, Emma Tennent reports on the process by which she and Ann Weatherall found the data they used in their recent ROLSI paper on person reference in police calls.

How do the police deal with people who call in for help?  

Ann Weatherall and I wanted to study what barriers people faced in calling police emergency and non-emergency lines about gendered violence. But the New Zealand police had never previously released call-recordings for research. The process of getting permission was a long one, with much to learn on the way; but we succeeded, and we’re delighted to have our first article based on that data published in ROLSI. We hope that this description of the process might help as a guide to the kind of ups and downs this kind of applied research involves.

I imagine that many interaction researchers will have been curious about how a voice-activated internet-connected device might be integrated (or not) into conversations at home.  Martin Porcheron along with Stuart Reeves,  Joel Fischer and Sarah Sharples (all at the University of Nottingham) went the next step, and did the research. Here Martin and Stuart explain how the research was done…

Martin Porcheron

Stuart Reeves

Voice-based ‘smartspeaker’ products, such as the Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple HomePod have become popular consumer items in the last year or two. These devices are designed for use in the home, and offer a kind of interaction where users may talk to an anthropomorphised ‘intelligent personal assistant’ which responds to things like questions and instructions. Continue reading →

How good are your video records? One angle? Two? Wide-angle? Was the camera static or did you move to catch things – and miss other things? How good was the sound? All of us have occasionally been frustrated with what we find on the screen when we come to analyse it, but Jacob Davidsen and Paul McIlvenny have some more fundamental concerns. Just how “big” should data be? 

Paul McIlvenny (l.) and Jacob Davidsen

Continue reading →