Recording and Understanding Mobile People and Mobile Technology

In Recording and Understanding Mobile People and Mobile Technology, Paul Tennent and Matthew Chalmers present the Replayer system to record and understand the activity of people moving and interacting with each other via mobile technologies. Their focus is the combination of observational techniques, usually based on video recording, and system-based techniques that log or instruments the technologies in use.

Their approach mixing qualitative and quantitave data is explained as:

One one side we have the more exploratory and qualitative assessment often favoured by ethnographers, and on the other hand is the more hypothesis-driven and quantitative approach often favored by technologists. Replayer does not subscribe completely to either of these views instead seeking to enhance each with aspects of the other.

One main challenge of such analysing tool is to synchronise hetegoreneous data comming from multiple distributed sources (clients, server, videos, audios, …). Logs may be inconsistent (i.e. when users are out of wireless network hotspots). One approach to this issue is keying:

Manually examining a single data set in great detail, for example a video recording of a system trial, and then using it as a “key” to select important or relevant periods of time in the experience to investigate with the help of relevant subsets of other data such as system logs