Grand Challenge — The Continuous Study and Dynamic Visualization of Gesture Ensembles: A Tutorial

Communicative movements such as gestures are often studied categorically — but they don’t have to be. In this hands-on tutorial, Wim Pouw went over research and programming routines to study gesture as an ensemble of relational events. Specifically, he covered the use of bivariate time-series analyses to construct kinematic spaces and gesture networks (with an accompanying Python tutorial). Building on previous work — for example on silent gestures — this method has proven useful for tracking systematicity in evolving silent-gesture systems and detecting the emergence of kinematic dialects. He also showed how these results can be integrated into dynamic data dashboards, and introduced the envisionbox.org initiative, a platform for showcasing multimodal signal-processing routines aimed at making methods in the field more transparent and fostering cumulative science.

Participation had no prerequisites; those wishing to follow the hands-on portion were asked to install the software beforehand.