New publication: To Gesture or Not (NIME 2014)

This week I am participating at the NIME conference, organised at Goldsmiths, University of London. I am doing some administrative work as chair of the NIME steering committee, and I am also happy to present a paper tomorrow:

Title
To Gesture or Not? An Analysis of Terminology in NIME Proceedings 2001–2013

Links
Paper (PDF)
Presentation (HTML)
Spreadsheet with summary of data (ODS)
OSX shell script used for analysis

Abstract
The term ‘gesture’ has represented a buzzword in the NIME community since the beginning of its conference series. But how often is it actually used, what is it used to describe, and how does its usage here differ from its usage in other fields of study? This paper presents a linguistic analysis of the motion-related terminology used in all of the papers published in the NIME conference proceedings to date (2001– 2013). The results show that ‘gesture’ is in fact used in 62 % of all NIME papers, which is a significantly higher percentage than in other music conferences (ICMC and SMC), and much more frequently than it is used in the HCI and biomechanics communities. The results from a collocation analysis support the claim that ‘gesture’ is used broadly in the NIME community, and indicate that it ranges from the description of concrete human motion and system control to quite metaphorical applications.

Reference
Jensenius, A. R. (2014). To gesture or not? An analysis of terminology in NIME proceedings 2001–2013. In Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces For Musical Expression, pages 217–220, London.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Jensenius:2014c,
    Address = {London},
    Author = {Jensenius, Alexander Refsum},
    Booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces For Musical Expression},
    Pages = {217--220},
    Title = {To Gesture or Not? {A}n Analysis of Terminology in {NIME} Proceedings 2001--2013},
    Year = {2014}}