Satinder GillThe domain of gesture, an important aspect of communication, is coming into fruition as a discipline in it's own right. It has long been studied within areas ranging from biology, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, theatre studies, dance, and philosophy. The first international conference on gesture was held in the spring of 2000 in Porto, Portugal. This mingling of cultures and languages representing many approaches to the subject made it a memorable event. The field of gesture now has it's first journal, edited by Adam Kendon and Cornelia Muller.
sgill@csli.stanford.edu
Since my arrival at Stanford, I have encountered a wide diversity of discussions and much interesting work upon gesture. I remembered Porto and felt the need to organise a forum here where people can meet to share ideas, methods, and contexts, across their disciplines. Some of us have now formed a Gesture Group, and we welcome others to join us.
The Seminar Series takes place once a month in Cordura 100, CSLI. The series
is open to everyone. Our first speaker was Sotaro
Kita from the Max Planck Institute of
Psycholinguistics, the Netherlands, and he spoke upon the relation between
gesture and cognition. The second seminar was conducted by Kay Kostapolus from the Stanford Drama department, and
was on the relation between gesture and language. This was followed by Steve DiPaola from SUDAC, Stanford University
Digital Arts Centre, talking upon gesture and avatar-based 3D virtual
communities.
On 24th April, the seminar was jointly sponsored by the Symbolic Systems
Forum at Stanford. The speaker was Justine Cassell from
the MIT Media Lab. The last seminar in
June was by Satinder Gill, of CKIR (Centre for Knowledge and
Innovation Research), Finland, on a relation between knowledge and gesture.
We opened up the seminar series for the Fall quarter with a talk on the synchrony of body movement with speech, by Anne Wiltshire, on 23rd October. Our next speaker was Victoria Vesna, Chair of the dept. of Design|Media Arts at UCLA. Her work looks into dialogues enabled in the relation between body, technology and connectedness, and she reflected on how media arts can support many kinds of narrative.
In the Winter quarter, on February 7th, we had Katharine Young, speaking on gestures and communication. We start the Spring quarter with Asli Ozyurek, talking about the influence of culture and language on gestural representations, on 16th April. This was followed on 16th May, with a special discussion that examined and reflected upon the field of Gesture within HCI. This was be chaired by Terry Winograd, department of Computer Science, Stanford, and initiated by Barbara Kelly, dept. of Linguistics, UC Santa Barbara.
We opened the series for Fall 2002, with David Wilkins, Center for Aphasia and Related Disorders, V.A. Northern California Health Care System. He spoke with us on October 3rd, upon pointing gestures, culture and language, with a specific focus on the Arrernte of Australia. This will be followed, on November 19th, with a talk by Jurgen Streek of UT Austin, Texas.
Suggestions for future seminars are also welcome.
I have set up a mailing list for announcements about events, queries and limited discussion about gesture: gestures@csli.stanford.edu. Anyone can subscribe to this list by mailing to majordomo@csli.stanford.edu, and including in the body of the message the line
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Recent
The 4th International Workshop on Gesture and Sign Language based Human-Computer Interaction
ORAGE 2001