Gesture coding with the NEUROGES - ELAN system

Date: Tuesday August 28
Time: 11:00 - 15:30
Location: A

INSTRUCTOR RESUME

Hedda Lausberg is a Full Professor of Neurology, Psychosomatic Medicine, and Psychiatry. Her main research interests are the neuropsychology of movement behavior and the development of behavioral tools for coding body movement behaviour, such as the NEUROGES system.

German Sport University, Cologne, Germany
h.lausberg@dshs-koeln.de / www.dshs-koeln.de

Han Sloetjes is software developer at "The Language Archive" department of the MPI for Psycholinguistics and the main responsible person for the annotation tool ELAN.

Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; han.sloetjes@mpi.nl / tla.mpi.nl

BENEFITS OF THE TUTORIAL

The NEUROGES-ELAN system is a tool for the empirical analysis of hand movement behaviour including gesture. It combines the coding system NEUROGES and the annotation tool ELAN. The Neuropsychological Gesture Coding System (NEUROGES) is based on neuroscience research, specifically on the evidence that different types of hand movement behaviour are generated in different brain regions. Furthermore, the different types are associated with different cognitive (spatial cognition, language, praxis), emotional, and interactive functions. The NEUROGES system comprises three Modules: I. Kinesics, II. Bimanual Relation, III. Function.In this tutorial, participants will learn about the structure and theoretical background of NEUROGES and its application in ELAN. The focus of the tutorial is on the practical use of the NEUROGES-ELAN system.

FEATURES

Participants will be introduced to:

• The theoretical part (1 hour)

1. The Theoretical and Empirical Background of the NEUROGES System

2. The NEUROGES-Algorithms and Coding Manuals

• The practical part (2 hours)

1. ELAN

1. The basics of media annotation (coding) with ELAN

2. Creation and application of Controlled Vocabularies in ELAN

2. NEUROGES - Training of Gesture Coding

1. Module I Kinesics (Activation, Structure, Focus)

2. Module II Bimanual Relation (Contact, Formal Relation)

3. Module III Function (Function, Type)

4. (optional: Specification categories: Techniques of Presentation, Temporal Structure, Target Location, Execution Hemi-Space, Referent, Trigger/Motive)

3. ELAN

1. Introduction to the search facilities

2. Introduction to assessing inter-rater agreement

4. Introduction to using the interactive NEUROGES-ELAN learning tool

5. Gesture coding exercise with the NEUROGES-ELAN coding system

AUDIENCE

Any researcher and student involved in empirical gesture research, apraxia research, non-verbal communication research, or clinical behavioral research in psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine. However, no pre-existing knowledge is assumed. Participants should bring their own laptop and preferably have ELAN installed (http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/download) and downloaded the NEUROGES/ELAN template and example files from ELAN's third party resources webpage (http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/thirdparty).