Readings Oct. 3

Hutchby, I. & Wooffitt, R. (2008). Conversation analysis, 2nd edition. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. 

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Chapter	Summary	Of Note
4- Analysing Data I: Building Collections and Identifying Phenomena	·3 stages to CA procedure: find something interesting (unmotivated looking), describe what is happening formally with attention to sequence (what happens before and after), go back to the data to see if this description holds up (if not rinse and repeat.) ·Particularized and generalized · 2 Questions when examining data: what action is happening? and how do people orient (also an action) to that action? ·Actions people do- continuers, you say x, oh	I had questions in the DP class about the role of variation. The description of the 500 telephone calls (p. 91) helped me understand that identifying variation helps the DP/DA/CA researcher to relook at the data and reformulate their interpretation. I also had an early question in the DP class (which was answered, but I found it again here) about the credentials needed to be a DP researcher. Hutchby and Woofitt address this as commonsense knowledge and a sound understanding of the culture (p. 106).
5- Analysing Date II: Extended Sequences and Single Cases	· Short and long talk sequences are equally analyzable. This chapter focuses on longer talk sequences. o Single case- CA is particularized to the single case (but generalized to patterns of talk). The same anaylsis holds true for single case as shorter sequences described in earlier chapters.  § Telephone conversations 4 steps p. 117 § Fishing/ my-side telling o Storytelling- still in sequences and series §  Story preface- storyteller gets permission from receiver to use more than one turn-construction unit.	My mother and I are storytellers. I spoke with her on the phone today and noticed how we told our stories. One interesting part of our sequence was when I was telling my story, I expected a continuer (um-hm) and paused for one, but my mother didn’t say anything. I stopped the story to ask “are you still there?”
6- Talk in Institutional Settings	·  Formal- court, news interviews, job interviews, traditional style teaching, ceremonial occasions (weddings come to mind) o Turns are constrained and people can get in trouble for speaking out of turn (courtrooms). Some people participating in these conversations must position themselves as objective and neutral in the conversation (journalists, judges). ·  Informal- business meetings, retail/service, doctor’s appointments o Turns have boundaries, but usually proceed like “quasi-conversations” (p. 151).	This chapter was particularly interesting to me, because my dissertation topic is based on institutional text. I think that participants will use institutional talk when I collect data in focus groups, because they will be in a classroom speaking with other teachers.

            I nerded out while reading this book. It was a pleasure to read- because of the writing style, but also because of the content. I like the practicality of CA, and these chapters brought home some of my earlier questions (see above.) If I’m doing being-a-CA-nerd, then I might as well say it- I’m excited about reading the rest of this book!

 

Readings Sept. 26

Rapley, T. (2007). Doing conversation, discourse and document analysis. London: Sage. 

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    After reading chapters 6-10, I thought another table was in order...

Chapter	Summary	Of Note
6: Exploring conversations	·  Conversation analysis examines how language is action and what those actions do. ·  This chapter includes specific actions that can happen in text including: o  Perspective-display sequence o turn-taking organization o  question-answer sequence o agreement or disagreement (preferred or dispreferred response) ·  Word choice is action. ·  Placement of words or utterances within a narrative is action. (This can be simple or complex.)	The words people choose are actions and examining what people do can lead to practical applications. Example: saying no to sexual advances is anti-social. Often we don’t say no, but others understand and infer the word no.
7: Exploring conversations about and with documents	·  Documents and other texts are discourses that are situated and used to do actions. “…documents…and related technologies...both constrain and enable our actions and interactions” p. 89 ·  Having a range of documents can help researchers to understand discourse in more depth (example: the diagnosis of Anna-Lize’s psychiatric condition.) ·  Discourse can transform the content of documents as people use the documents (example: the pharmacist reading a research report on drugs and adding contextual information as the document is read aloud.) ·  Documents are “spoken for” (p. 95) (example: video in the Rodney King trial is made sense of collaboratively between witness and defense lawyer.)	Things can be part of everyday, taken-for-granted, social occurrences. The author asks questions about how I read his book and take notes. In order to interact with the information, I buy hard copies of textbooks instead of kindle ebook versions. I find that I highlight, take notes, and draw diagrams when I have paper to write on (the margins and text lines.) If I have the e-book version of a text, I just read and do not grasp the information because I do not interact in the same ways. (Side note: interesting that the author called the case on pg 95 the Rodney King trial when the officers were on trial.)
8: Exploring conversations and discourse: some debates and dilemmas	·  Analysis of discourse and conversation as outlined in Rapley’s book has been critiqued for not being critical of power structures. Rapley’s solution to the problem of when and what power structures to attend to in discourse is to pay attention to how the participants orient to power and use his own judgment, as well as, relevant literature to guide how he handles power structures in context. ·  Other possible critiques of analysis: o  the hidden role of the analyst- sometimes understanding can only come with insider knowledge, researchers have taken-for-granted knowledge and unique perspectives, and researchers should be reflexive of the role of their own knowledge. o  focus on brief moments of interaction- use next-turn proof procedure and provide excerpts so readers can see for themselves. o  working with local contexts of focus group and interview data- include interview questions as well as answers and realize that participants may not believe or behave what they say. o  working with power- “power can work as much by encouraging persons to speak, as by silencing them” (p.109)	Loved this quote from Harvey Sacks: “I have a bunch of stuff and I want to see whether an order for it exists. Not that I want to try to order it, but I want to try to see whether there’s some order to it” p. 109.
9:Exploring documents	·  What is said is as important as what is not said. To see the whole picture, examine both.] ·  Text is rhetorical, just like talk. They also are action- they do things. ·  Approach talk and text with skepticism. ·  Where talk and text came from (or how they evolved) can be important to understanding how talk and text is historically and socially situated now.	Ugh- See below.
10: Studying discourse: some closing comments	·  Analyzing discourse begins before you collect data. It occurs when an idea/interest is formed, when ROLs are collected, and while RQs are formed and revised. ·  There is not “a truth”, but being credible and plausible is the researcher’s job. o  Look for patterns and variation. o  Be transparent with process. o  Compare your work to other work. o  Work with participants. o  Be reflexive. ·  The author summarizes key points of analyzing conversations, discourse and documents (p. 130-131).	Rapley talks about new literary forms of sharing research- like poetry and dramas. I’ve seen this referenced in some of our other readings. I’m guessing that this is not happening in journals, but maybe in book form? Any examples of this I could look at?

            Overall, I enjoyed this book. I actually read it all in one day so I could get the flow of the book. The only chapter I did not like was Chapter 9. I agree with Rapley that we should treat documents as rhetorical objects (texts) and be skeptical of the assumptions within the content, as well as, the context of the document (who created it, what does it do, what is it’s history.) However, I got lost with the “histories of the present” section and the case study that followed. I didn’t get the point, and I bulled my way through those pages.

            Mostly, this book put my mind at ease. It was a very straightforward description of CA/DA, and I do not feel intimidated to do this kind of research work. I actually can believe that “this work is deeply fascinating and, above all, fun” p. 131.

 

Readings Sept. 19

Hutchby, I. & Wooffitt, R. (2008). Conversation analysis, 2nd edition. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. 

Jefferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an Introduction. In G. H. Lerner (Ed.) Conversation analysis: Studies from the first generation (pp. 13- 23). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Wiggins, S., Potter, J. & Wildsmith, A. (2001). Eating your words: Discursive psychology and the reconstruction of eating practices. Journal of Health Psychology 6(5), 5-15. 

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Summary of the first 3 chapters of Hutchby and Woofitt’s book.

Chapter	Summary	Of Note
1: What is Conversation Analysis?	·  Major names: Harvey Sacks (founder of CA), Gail Jefferson (Jeffersonian transcription), Schegloff ·  CA uses naturally occurring talk, specifically focusing on talk-in-interaction, and believes talk is structured, organized action. ·  Tools: next-turn proof procedure, membership categories, word choice for fact building ·  Ties to ethnomethodology (Garfinkel)- how people account for their own and others’ actions.	I’m starting to understand (after reading the section on ethnomethodology) why DP researchers include DP, DA, CA, and ethnomethodology in descriptions of their studies. Each piece is important to DP, but they are all distinct ways of doing research.
2: Conversational Structures: The Foundations of Conversation Analysis	1)   Sequential order a)    Turns are taken serially, but also are linked together. 2)   Inferential order a)    People rely on their interpretation to know what kind of turn is occurring 3)   Temporal order a)    Turn construction units occur in time. 4)   All 3 orders interact during talk a)    4 key analytic factors to illustrate that interaction i)     Adjacency and Preference Structures ii)    Turn-taking (1) Turn-construction (a) Projectability (b) Transition-relevance Place (2) Turn-distribution iii)  Overlapping Talk iv)  Repair and Correction	This chapter was straightforward. It is good to know that “most instances of overlap occur in an environment of possible transition-relevance places” (p. 54), because I am an overlapper! I thought I was just not paying attention, but maybe I was projecting the completion the end of a turn-construction unit.
3: Data and Transcription	· Data are the audio or video files not the transcription. · Transcription is part of the analysis process. o Transcribe turn-taking and the texture of the utterances (prosody, pauses, laughter, breath intakes) ·  Transcripts are impressionistic- they are what the transcriber heard and wrote.	It sounds as if CA researchers transcribe all their data using some form of Jeffersonian, because “any sound may have interactional import” (p.72).

            Hutchby and Woofit’s book has been helpful. It feels like a few missing pieces are starting to fall into place. Conversation analysis is the how of DP. The structure of using naturally occurring talk, looking at how people use talk and text, and the importance of listening repeatedly to the data in DP work all came from or are supported by CA. I think that I will be ready, when the time comes, to collect, transcribe, analyze, and report my data for my dissertation. (Also, I’ve added Sack’s lectures to my to-read list.)

            Jefferson’s article compared ways to report and analyze data using varying depths of transcription. She has a no-nonsense, no apologies way of approaching her work. For example, when she asks herself what good is transcribing to such detail, she replies“…it seems to me that one cannot know what one will find until one finds it…” (p. 15). She includes the work that laughter can do to enhance a declination or mask words possibly “on purpose.” She also illustrated how the same word can be enunciated or spoken with dialect depending on the work the word is doing. She concluded with the idea to look at the little things to find undiscovered ways of orderliness.

            Wiggins, Potter, and Wildsmith’s article is about how families with teenage daughters talk about eating (the actual food, hunger, and restraint from eating too much). They used naturally occurring talk and provided excerpts of one family’s conversations as examples of the patterns they heard. Analysis of each issue (how the family constructs the object, individual, and behavior) was given after the excerpts. I wrote about this article for the DP class this summer. I still find this article to be well written and organized. It is a great empirical example that helps to understand DP/CA.

Readings Sept. 12

Rapley, T. (2007). Doing conversation, discourse and document analysis. London: Sage. 


Luff, P. & Heath, C. (2012). Some ‘technical challenges’ of video analysis: social actions, objects, material realities and the problems of perspective. Qualitative Research 12, 255-279.

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    For this week's readings, I have organized the summary and particular information of note into a table. (You know I love tables!) 

Chapter	Summary	Of Note
1: Studying Discourse	·  Define discourse analysis as an interest in “how language is used in certain contexts” (p. 2) ·  Social constructionism focuses research on how discourse is produced and negotiated, the everyday talk that creates knowledge and is therefore action, and the historical and social context in which discourse is situated. ·  Overview of the content of the book’s chapters.	Great description of identity/membership category/subject position on page 2-3 (adoptee’s identity of binary “facts”).
2: Generating an archive	·  2 types of data: researcher generated and naturally occurring ·  Documents- after gaining physical access to the documents, note where they were found, and read academic work to find documents that may be relevant to your research. ·  Audio/visual- sometimes naturally occurring data can be very different than that found in a researcher’s lab. Watch for the silent witness (the recording device may change the naturally occurring occurrence). Take your own (as the researcher) actions into account.	Either type of data is still manipulated by the researcher, because both types have to be found, collected, and either used or ignored. Love the idea of the silent witness. I know that I am very aware of recording devices (or observers), and I often adjust my language choices.
3: Ethics and recording ‘data’	·  Shift to research participants instead of subjects. ·  Get informed consent from participants in writing. Make sure they understand the research and process (including how to get out!) Get consent for each type of recording/data usage. ·  Recording in public or other spaces may require the permission of the site’s owner or manager.	Including consent for each type of data usage is not something I had considered before (although I have seen examples of IRBs with multiple data usage.) I realized as I was thinking of my own research, that I might want to use data for different purposes. If so, I need to consider those ahead of time to get consent.
4: The practicalities of recording	·  There are a variety of recording devices. (This chapter is outdated.) ·  For either researcher generated or naturally occurring data collection, the researcher needs to recruit participants, generate topics or know topics that are likely to come into conversations, and record the discourse. ·  Be wary of the silent witness messing with data collection.	In researcher generated interviews or focus groups, the researcher should have a general idea of the topics to discuss (at the least) and keep that theme or issue across interviews or focus groups. (But not worry about using exactly the same questions.) For naturally occurring data, the researcher needs to know basically what the participants are likely to talk about. Without some work on the front end, the researcher might not get any useable data. (Not sure if DP would agree with this.)
5: Transcribing audio and video materials	·  Transcribed audio or video does not capture everything that happens. (Transcriptions are “translations” p. 50.) ·  Researchers delimit what data they collect by their data collection and transcribing choices. Ex: where the camera lens is pointing or how much information to include in transcription (using Jeffersonian or notating gestures). ·  Adding details to your transcription or description of your data changes the texture of the transcript. ·  Compares ways of transcribing audio and video of the politics of a cucumber. ·  Video can capture gaze, touch, gesture, posture, spatial positioning, and other actions.	This chapter contains a lot of practical information that I will come back to when I am transcribing data for class later in the semester. One section that stuck out was the explanation of how to know how long pauses are in conversation (p. 63). I would also include facial expression in the list of what video can capture.

            Overall, the first 5 chapters of Rapley’s book contained practical, applicable information for doing conversation analysis. The comparison between general transcription, Jeffersonian transcription, and video transcription gave me a better idea of what it means to transcribe audio and video and how I may use this in my own research. The Luff and Heath article piggybacked on Rapley’s 5^th chapter by discussing the pro’s and con’s of video analysis.

            I have been considering using a focus group’s conversation for my dissertation data. I think that I would like to use mostly audio recordings, but because there will be quite a few participants, I would like to video the group “to aid in the transcription process” (Rapley, 2007, p. 40). After reading Luff and Heath’s article, I will probably set up two cameras (I’m thinking of using GoPro’s.) using a mid-shot to capture three people at once. I also, think that I will give each participant a copy of the TEAM rubric (which is the topic of conversation) and maybe a scrap sheet of paper so that they can take notes. (I’d ask for those scraps to include with my data.) My current plan is to have a facilitator and to not physically be in the room (or even the school). The facilitator that I have in mind has experience with using GoPro’s and tripods.