Existing research on synchronous remote working in CSCW has highlighted the troubles that can arise because actions at one site are (partially) unavailable to remote colleagues. Such ‘local action’ is routinely characterised as a nuisance, a distraction, subordinate and the like. This paper explores interconnections between ‘local action’ and ‘distributed work’ in the case of a research team virtually collocated through ‘MiMeG’. MiMeG is an e-Social Science tool that facilitates ‘distributed data sessions’ in which social scientists are able to remotely collaborate on the real-time analysis of video data. The data are visible and controllable in a shared workspace and participants are additionally connected via audio conferencing. The findings reveal that whilst the (partial) unavailability of local action is at times problematic, it is also used as a resource for coordinating work. The paper considers how local action is interactionally managed in distributed data sessions and concludes by outlining implications of the analysis for the design and study of technologies to support group-to-group collaboration.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag London Limited
About this paper
Cite this paper
Tutt, D., Hindmarsh, J., Shaukat, M., Fraser, M. (2007). The distributed work of local action: Interaction amongst virtually collocated research teams. In: Bannon, L.J., Wagner, I., Gutwin, C., Harper, R.H.R., Schmidt, K. (eds) ECSCW 2007. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84800-031-5_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84800-031-5_11
Publisher Name: Springer, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-84800-030-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-84800-031-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)