Coding Manual for "The Distant Gardener: What Conversations in the Telegarden Reveal about Human-Telerobotic Interaction"

Abstract

The Telegarden is a small plot of earth encircling an industrial robotic arm. A web-based interface allows users to activate the robotic arm, view the garden through a camera mounted on the robotic arm, change the view, plant a seed, water it, and (if one is a successful gardener) water the resulting plant on an on-going basis. Many thousands of remote users have interacted with the Telegarden in such ways, and communicated to one another through an associated Telegarden chatroom. The Telegarden was developed under the co-direction of Ken Goldberg and Joseph Santarromana, and it represents an emerging form of human-computer interaction - that of telepresence. In a recent study, we investigated the user experience of nature as mediated by this telerobotic installation by analyzing the conversations in 3 months of associated Telegarden chat (16,504 posts). This technical report provides the full coding manual we used to code the chat data. Our goal is to present this manual such that - as part of an on-going iterative scientific process - it can be used and modified by others interested in investigating human-telerobotic interaction.