Digital Replay system (DRS): A Tool for Interaction Analysis  Patrick Brundell,  Paul Tennent,  Chris Greenhalgh,  Dawn Knight,  Andy Crabtree,  Claire O’Malley,  Shaaron Ainsworth,  David Clarke,  Ronald Carter and  Svenja Adolphs Email pat.brundell@nottingham.ac.uk  School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK, NG7 2RD  School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK, NG7 2RD  School of English Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK, NG7 2RD Abstract Digital Replay System (DRS) is a software tool being developed by the DReSS node of the UK ESRC-funded National Centre for e-Social Science. It is publically available under an open source license and is designed to support the organisation, synchronised replay, and analysis of complex multimodal corpora including audio, video, dialogue transcripts and system log files. This paper describes the key features of the system with examples from a study of collaborative use of an interactional learning environment. Introduction The community of researchers investigating human-human and human-computer interaction collect rich data sets that are becoming ever larger and more diverse as digital recording technologies increase in availability and ease of use. A wide range of both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies are used to investigate these multimodal corpora and software tools are increasingly necessary in order to manage the organisation, replaying, structured and free coding (and annotation) and analysis of these growing data sets. The size and range of data sets produced by varying methodological approaches mean that often the analytical process is tailored to an individual study, and is extremely time consuming. It is also often difficult to relate multiple analyses (for examples see Ainsworth and Burcham, 2007 and Forsyth et al., 2006) There are a number of tools already in existence to support the analysis of interactions. Examples of such tools appear both commercially and academically. Transana (http://www.transana.org ) is widely used, and focuses primarily on transcription of both audio and video. Developed by Noldus, The Observer (http://www.noldus.com ) was designed originally for studying animal behaviour patterns, but has been adopted as a more general coding solution within the social sciences. Mangold International’s INTERACT (http://www.mangold- international.com ) is another observational analysis solution that supports the process of coding videos, then provides some simple visualisation tools to support analysis of the coded data. One final commercial tool supporting real time coding of video is Studiocode (http://www.studiocodegroup.com ), this has been developed for Apple’s