Drawing and Handwriting on Mobile Phones

Drawing and Handwriting on Mobile Phones, Marc Relieu, Conference Seeing, Understanding, Learning in the Mobile Age Budapest, April 28–30, 2005

Even though this paper has a too strong ethnomethodological perspective, it gives me ideas on how I should analyze the annotations made by the players of CatchBob! How about analyze usage of a mobile, multi-users, synchronous pen-driven map annotation tool? In CatchBob! every pen stroke, hand-made drawings, handwritten texts are shared between the TabletPC users.

This study is based on Orange Scribble, a an instant messaging services permit to merge drawings with handwritten texts and to send them in real time on touch sensitive mobile phone displays. The creation of endless new combinations between handwritten text and drawings, either to solicit attention, to open an exchange, to produce an evaluation or to initiate a new topic turns ogame-like practice. The author examine how the local senses of drawings is occasioned and established as a concerted practical accomplishment.

It is interesting to see that the users still wrote in a serially manner. They position each new contribution just in the next line after the last. While doing this, they preserve, through a spatial positioning of their writing and drawing, not only the seriality, but also the sequentiality of their exchange.