Trying to Catch Up...

So...I've gotten a little very behind.  Attempting to catch up from the last 2 weeks.  I started first with the books...

Rapley.  I like him.  His book is easy to read.  Very conversational.  I needed that.  I felt like I understood social constructionism, but then when we talked about it in class a few weeks ago, I wasn't so sure anymore.  His explanations in Ch. 1 were helpful in getting me back on track.  Love this quote: "Put simply, our understanding of things, concepts or ideas that we might take for granted like 'sexuality', 'madness' or 'instincts' is not somehow natural  or pre-given but rather is the product of human actions and interactions, human history, society and culture." (p. 4).  His key points for this chapter are great take aways from a lot of what we have discussed thus far this semester.  I've been really unsure of what kind of document(s) I want to use for analysis.  I think this is partially because I wasn't sure what kinds of documents could be used.  The way he talks about using data to build an archive was helpful to me.  I also liked how he listed lots of examples.  I really liked the example of looking at newspaper headlines.  Not because I plan to do this for any reason, but because it helped me understand that a part of a whole could be examined (if that makes any sense.)  But even after reading this section, I still don't really know what kind of text-based data source I want to analyze.  I wanted it to be connected in some way to the videotape of a classroom, but I can't really figure out how to do that.  I guess I could do the school's website or the teacher's daily instruction log...  His descriptions of collective A/V data made me pretty happy about my choice.  I'm using a video of a class during writing instruction.  This classroom has videocameras mounted on two walls in the classroom.  Writing instruction is recorded daily so the students are desensitized to the recording.  I'm pretty confident that the language captured will be as close to "naturally occurring" as possible.  I really liked Ch. 5.  Why?  Because I honestly knew nothing about transcribing A/V materials.  Where was this chapter before I did an entire study using interviews with beginning deaf educators in Intro to Qual?  I know that some of the techniques for transcribing discussed in this text and in Conversation Analysis are specific to this methodology, but even knowing the techniques Rapley used in just the basic transcript (pps. 53-54) really would have helped tremendously.  I felt like there was so much that I wasn't capturing because I didn't know about these procedures.  I collected some great data, but if I had known a better way to transcribe and analyze it, my study would have been better...  Anyway, I really liked his discussion about determining what level of detail to transcribe.  It was helpful for me to think about.  His sections on "working with video-based data" and "transcribing images" were especially helpful to me because of the participants with whom I tend to work and the types of data I tend to collect.  (How many times have I used helpful in the paragraph?)  Having worked at a school for students with sensory impairments for several years, I'm familiar with adding closed captions and descriptive audio.  I have had to do both on multiple occasions.  I couldn't help but think that a detailed transcript should basically be a combination of these two accommodations.  I think conceptualizing transcription in this way will help me to determine the amount of detail to include.

Hutchby & Wooffitt.  We've done a lot of reading so far this semester, but the whole time, I've been wondering exactly why I thought I was interested in Discourse Analysis and why I thought it would be helpful to my research.  The introduction helped me start to figure this out.  In the introduction, H & B say that CA is relevant to enthnography of communication, pragmatics, and discourse analysis.  As a linguistics person, I could visualize how CA could be used in of these areas...and see them as 3 separate areas.  I think because I'm interested in all 3 of these areas of linguistics the lines start to blur and I start confusing myself.  I think all along I thought that I was interested in discourse analysis, but what I really am most interested in is conversation analysis, which is a tool of discourse analysis.  "At the most basic level, conversation analysis is the study of talk.  To put it in slightly more complex terms, it is the systematic analysis of the talk produced in everyday situations of human interaction:  talk-interaction" (p. 11).  Yep.  That is what I want to study--talk.  But...part of my problem is that I'm also interested in language.  As we've been reading and talking this semester, I kept thinking about this and trying to figure out how to separate these two things.  I'm pretty sure the last paragraph on p. 12. was written just for me.  (I'm including it at the bottom of this post so I can read it again periodically, when my brain starts blending language and talk-in-interaction again.)  Basically this chapter really started to challenge my thinking about language/talk/talk-in-interaction--especially the last key point in Sacks' 'wild' possibility (Also included at the bottom of this post).  This point really does challenge a lot of the ideas that I have held as a person whose done a lot of work in sociolinguistics.  As I read through the discussion on conversational structures in chapter 2, I wondered if there are any differences with the nature of turn-taking with signed-language-interaction or how non-manual markers might be best indicated in conversation analysis.  I really liked the way data and transcription were described in Ch. 3.   --"The transcript is seen as a 'representation' of the data; while the tape itself is viewed as a 'reproduction' of a determinate social event" (p. 70).   The way the chapter was set up (description, followed by example) made it much easier to start to see how these symbols are used to transcribe in CA.  But it did make the idea of transcribing sign language, increasingly more daunting!  If spoken language transcription is this complex... yikes!  :-)  (I know you said there is a way to code on the video so we don't have to transcribe, and I may try that out for this project.  But I definitely still see the value in transcription and know I will need to develop this skill for future work.)  Note to self:  Work on converting the video to a file that is compatible with Atlas.ti.  :-)

"In relation to this, there is a further significance in saying that CA is the study not just of talk, but of talking-in-interaction.  On one level, talk involves language.  In fact it might be said that talk is the verbal instantiation of language.  But CA is only marginally interested in language as such; its actual object of study is the interactional organization of social activities.  CA is a radical departure from other forms of linguistically oriented analysis in that the production of utterances, and more particularly the sense they obtain, is seen not in terms of the structure of language, but first and foremost as a practical social accomplishment.  That is, words used in talk are not studied as semantic units, but as products or objects which are designed and used in terms of the activities being negotiated in the talk; as requests, proposals, accusations, complaints, and so on.  Moreover, the accomplishment of order, and of sense, or coherence, in talk-in-interaction is seen as inextricably tied to the local circumstances in which utterances are produced"  (p. 12)


Three key points of Sacks' 'wild' possibility:

• "Utterances may be viewed as objects which speakers use to accomplish particular things in their interactions with others" (p. 17)
• "Talk can be seen as methodic" (p. 18)
• "Talk-in-interaction can be treated as an object of analysis in its own right, rather than simply as a window through which we can view other social processes or broader sociological variables" (p. 19).