Motion-Capture-gestützte Gestenforschung

Zur Relevanz der Notationstheorie in den Digitalen Geisteswissenschaften

Abstract

During the last decade, and especially with the rise of the Digital Humani­ties, computer-assisted methods for gathering and analysing data have increasingly found their way into the humanities, which were traditionally oriented towards herme­neutics. Data elicitation and analysis are usually linked with quantitative research methods, but they are also connected with the construction of scientific models; they can be regarded as a transcription process that is involved in constituting the respecti­ve object of research. In this article, we study the use of motion capture technology for gesture research, in order to show more generally how theoretical modelling is connec­ted with the process that we employed to “capture” co-speech gesture. A semiotic ana­lysis is used to investigate the epistemological status of such data models, as well as the sign processes that determine this status. As a theoretical instrument for the ana­lysis of these computer-assisted processes of modelling and transcription, we apply Nelson Goodman’s theory of notation, which provides clear syntactic and semantic cri­teria for describing digital, notational, and analogue symbol systems. As a further approach, Ludwig Jäger’s theory of transcription is used to highlight how computer-based modelling techniques constitute the objects of investigation in the humanities. The article asks the following questions: What exactly are we recording when we use digital computer technology to capture human motion? Which criteria can be used to model these semiotic processes? What advantages does motion capture give us, and does it really offer new perspectives in comparison with other techniques such as tra­ditional video recordings? In conclusion, this contribution argues for a semiotic found­ation for the digital humanities and comparable approaches in the social sciences.