The Observer is a professional tool for the collection, management, analysis and presentation of observational data. The user can record activities, postures, movements, positions, social interactions or any other aspect of behavior. The Observer can be used either for live scoring, or for scoring from analog or digital video material. With The Observer's generic configuration utility, detailed coding schemes can be designed for observing hand gestures, body postures, and facial expression.

Recently, we have noticed an increasing interest from researchers in the area of multimodality and speech annotation. We are in the process of extending our software to cater for the specific demands of researchers in this field, through our active collaboration in the EU-funded NITE project (Natural Interactivity Tools Engineering, http://nite.nis.sdu.dk). At present, speech transcription involves free-format comments with time stamps. We are currently looking into options for XML export, and for allowing more structure for speech annotation.

The Observer 4.1, the latest release, will be demonstrated using a video of a group discussion. This video will be annotated for speech, gestures and facial expressions. Compared to previous editions, version 4.1 features improved usability, especially regarding the design of the coding scheme. Data selection has been completely redesigned to allow for complex filtering of annotation results. The Observer 4.1 has an intuitive new layout, showing projects and their content in a tree view.

Paper presented at Measuring Behavior 2002 , 4^th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research, 27-30 August 2002, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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