Jarmon completes the nation's first CD-ROM dissertation

Leslie Jarmon's doctoral dissertation could have contained page upon page of description of her data on nonverbal communication behaviors that occur during natural conversation, and even then readers would still not have a complete idea of what she was analyzing. So, Jarmon approached her adviser, University of Texas at Austin Speech Communication professor Robert Hopper, and asked about putting her dissertation into multimedia form.

Hopper, a leading conversation analyst who understands the problems inherent in putting oral and visual data into written form, was supportive but also somewhat skeptical. "I told her to take it slow," he said. "I asked her, 'Why do you need to do it this way? Why can't you do a traditional dissertation?"

Jarmon persisted, and won over Hopper and her committee. She still had to win over the graduate school, however, and Richard Cherwitz, former Graduate Director in the Speech Communication department and now Associate Dean in the Graduate School, was helpful in obtaining the necessary approvals. Still the request was a controversial one, and the university, while giving Jarmon approval as an experiment, also convened a faculty committee to study the matter and to devise policy for future requests.

While Jarmon produced her dissertation in CD-ROM form, she did so traditionally. There is an introductory section, followed by five "chapters," which are organized in the format typical of a doctoral dissertation. The text appears in a window that takes up about half the screen. The other half of the screen is split into three windows. The middle window always displays the chapter titles and allows the viewer to move from chapter to chapter. The upper window is reserved for showing video from the data set. The lower window shows still photos taken mostly from the video clips. The viewer can move through the dissertation sequentially, or, by means of accessing an index, the viewer can select the exact page from which to start or to which to jump. Forward and backward movement are controlled by clicking on arrow buttons at the bottom of the screen, and the video clips are controlled by clicking a "play/pause" button, also found at the bottom of the screen. The video clips and the still pictures are keyed to the text and may be played when the viewer has arrived at the appropriate point in the text.

Jarmon's research combined nonverbal communication, conversational analysis, and performance studies, all strengths of the speech communication faculty at Texas. Her work focuses on what she calls "embodied actions," which are the ordinary movements that people engage in while conversing. These movements not only indicate how any individual "turn" in conversation is constituted but are also performances that are shared among the interactants. Through conversational analysis Jarmon's work provided additional evidence that embodied actions constitute a syntax that can be understood and interpreted by the participants in the conversation.

When Jarmon was ready to produce the final version of the dissertation, she contacted University Microfilms, the repository for dissertations, to ask whether they would be willing to accept her dissertation in CD-ROM form. They replied that while they had never received a dissertation in that form, they would be happy to accept hers. Thus, Jarmon's dissertation became the first one to be stored permanently as a CD-ROM.

In the end, Jarmon's committee was very pleased with her work, though they admitted that they missed being able to work with the dissertation in its traditional paper form. While the CD-ROM provides for out-of-order movement, things work best when paging through in a linear fashion. Jumping to another place is much more difficult.

Now an Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at Indiana University, Bloomington, Jarmon plans to continue her work with digital video to capture people conversing "in the wild," as she calls it. She's particularly interested in the orderliness of the process of constructing buildings (some of the dissertation material came from a group of women who were participating in a Habitat for Humanity project), and she plans to investigate how that orderliness might affect conversation in those situations. Over the long range, she plans to "to continue a much deeper exploration of the embodiment of perspective and of the seamless way participants can perform shifts of perspective for one another and treat such performances as entirely unremarkable."

Clearly, the discipline is going to hear, and see, lots more from Leslie Jarmon.