Preliminary findings: Image‐enabled discourse and the creation of visual information

Preliminary findings are presented from a qualitative investigation of image‐making as information‐driven, communicative practice. Ad hoc visualizations are images spontaneously created during the natural flow of a conversation (e.g., napkin drawings). The activity of drawing in these situations is an informal information sharing practice occurring within an interactive, dynamic context. For this study, a discourse‐oriented methodology was developed for the direct observation and analysis of drawing during face‐to‐face conversations. This poster briefly describes this approach, including the novel protocol designed to capture video recordings of conversations involving the creation of ad hoc visualizations. Inductive, qualitative analysis of video data followed an iterative, grounded theory approach to multimodal social interactional analysis. A summary of preliminary findings highlights the dual nature of drawing as both information artifact and communicative activity. These findings have implications for visual information literacy, collaborative work, and image representation and retrieval.