Finally! a study about the use of handwritings on cell phones:Drawing and Handwriting on Mobile Phones by Marc Relieu at the Seeing, Understanding, Learning in the Mobile Age Conference (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, April 28–30, 2005).
Abstract: Mobile phone studies offer several opportunities to explore how interactional practices make sense of new communicational affordances. Beside asynchronous messaging systems that allow combining text and pictures in artful ways, new instant messaging services permit to merge drawings with handwritten texts and to send them in real time on touch sensitive mobile phone displays. I propose an applied conversation analysis of such handwritten exchanges and explain how drawings can be systematically and dynamically coupled with texts in the communicational environments they contribute to produce. The creation of endless new combinations between handwritten text and drawings, either to solicit attention, to open an exchange, to produce an evaluation or to initiate a new topic turns out to be an endogenous game-like practice.
