Selective Analysis of Linguistic Features Used in Video Mediated Collaboration: An Indicator of Users Sense of Co-presence

Studies in video mediated collaboration are going beyond traditional measures of time on task and task accuracy by attempting to qualify specific aspect of users’ experience. This paper explores users’ sense of co-presence as the extent to which they feel co-present with their partner when building collaboratively a toy over a video conferencing system. A linguistic analysis of the way users are referring to remote objects and places has been conducted in order to investigate the correlation between co-presence score and the frequency of local and remote deixis. Our results indicate that co-presence score is positively correlated to the frequency of local deixis as reported previously [1] and negatively correlated to remote deixis. We conclude that the words used by users when referring to remote objects and places may indicate aspects of user’s experience while engaged in remote collaboration.