Introduction to the special issue: ‘Human motion and social context’

Context and aim of the special issue

Human motion is a fundamental component of gesture, action and behavior. It refers to the process of changing the position of the body either as a whole or in part. Human motion is a multidisciplinary topic and is studied largely in social science fields. The question of human motion touches on the issues of communication, interaction, gender, learning processes, culture and society. Observing and analyzing human motion in various social contexts can give us a better understanding of our relationship with a society.

Human motion is a central subject not only in social science but also in robotics and computer science. The latter fields investigate how to decompose an action into a sequence of motions, to commutate motion dynamics and to generate human-like action in animation (e.g. video games) or in robots. Increasingly the comprehension of human motion and the collaboration with social science will be required for development in this field.

Human motion is an elusive and intangible object because it refers to dynamics and action. Studying such a subject needs an appropriate method. Various methodological approaches are used in different research areas. Drawing, photographing and filming are classical methods of recording and observing human motion. The technological tools such as motion capture or Kinect make it possible to measure and quantify human motion. Other methods such as dance notation systems, which are developed and used in the choreographic field, are also useful for identifying and comparing differences in human motion through their translation into symbols.

Although the issues of human motion are discussed and involved in the various fields, it seems the exchange of knowledge and discussion are less developed. The challenge of this special issue is to explore current studies, methodologies and standpoints concerning human motion in social context, and to promote the sharing of knowledge between multidisciplinary research areas. The special issue addresses the following questions:

Overview of the contributions

The present special issue contains eight contributions from sociology, anthropology, psychology, linguistics, education and robotics.

Sociology, in particular the sociology of body movement, proposes studying human motion as social facts and considers that the way of moving and its social context are strongly related. Naoko Abe’s article addresses this issue by focusing on Parisian subway-users’ motion in dense situations. This study analyzes human motions in detail using a transcription method called Kinetography Laban, which has been developed and used in the choreographic field but is still unknown in social sciences. The article by Gaëlle Chartier, Alain Berthoz, Eric Brian and Marie Jaisson questions how the body responds to an uncertain situation during individual interactions. For this purpose, the article analyzes processes of variation of individual motion from non-violent to violent movement. Lorenza Mondada’s article presents her detailed investigation of the coordination between talking and walking in a group. The article highlights how human mobile activity organizes in a social interaction and how it articulates with a conversation. These articles are particularly interesting from the standpoint of the role of human motion in social interaction.

Arnaud Dubois’ article examines body technique as a tool for transmitting technical knowledge, with a focus on a recent event that was held at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris in May 2016. In this event, the challenge was to explain technical and engineering information about bridge construction to museum audiences through acrobatic performances. The article also discusses the importance of preserving technical gestures, which contribute to create a technical object, as intangible heritage in the context of cultural transmission. In the framework of the same museum, the paper by Anne Jorro, Marie-Josée Gacogne, Jamila Al Khatib and Padma Ramsamy-Prat studies the gestures of a museum educator and asks what is an appropriate gesture to transmit complex information to audiences and to maintain their attention. These two articles highlight the role of gesture and body movement as a medium of transmission of specific knowledge.

Yoko Takeda’s paper deals with learning-process theories and different methods of learning tacit knowledge; it also explores the usefulness of motion capture in transmitting tacit knowledge of traditional art performances, which are sometimes difficult for veterans to explain to novice learners. The questions linked to technological devices are a relatively new research area and one that merits further research. The use of such technological devices is becoming more and more frequent and is spreading through the generation, but its impact is still unknown. More developments are expected in this research in the future.

Kyung-eun Shim and Blandine Bril’s article introduces us to a method of transcription of human motion created by Rodolf Laban and shows its usefulness for analyzing motion by comparing the ways of executing a pivot turn in Korean and French dance. In line with Shim and Bril’s contribution, the article by Naoko Abe, Jean-Paul Laumond, Paolo Salaris and Florent Levillain investigates the utility and the application of a dance notation system to robotics and computer science studies. The article discusses the advantages and difficulties entailed in the use of the dance notation system in robotic research from the standpoint of their experience with the collaborative work between robotics, social science and the choreographic field.

The reader will recognize the richness and variety of the topics linked to human motion and social context, especially the way of questioning and the methodologies. I believe that the special issue will contribute to opening and expanding further interdisciplinary discussion not only among social science fields but also between the social and technological sciences; this is a dialogue that is still rarely held, perhaps partially because of the difficulty of collaborating and sharing knowledge among fields with different research styles. I hope also that the study of human motion will gain depth and become better known because human motion can be one of the key elements to thinking about social interaction with persons, technological objects and the environment in different contexts.

I would like to thank all the authors for their contributions to the special issue, as well as Anne Rocha Perazzo, editor-in-chief of Social Science Information, for her support during the realization process.