Tiny Publics and Social Worlds—Toward a Sociology of the Local. Gary Alan Fine in Conversation With Reiner Keller

Gary Alan FINE gehört weltweit zu den prominentesten Persönlichkeiten der zeitgenössischen soziologischen Ethnografie. In diesem Gespräch spricht er über Einflüsse in seiner akademischen Laufbahn und prägende intellektuelle Entscheidungen. Er gilt als "serieller Ethnograf", der in zahlreichen Feldkontexten gearbeitet hat und dabei einerseits Kleingruppen und eine von Menschen bevölkerte Ethnografie favorisiert, sich andererseits mit Gerüchten, Klatsch und moralischen Geschichten beschäftigt, die in kleinen und größeren Publiken erzählt werden. FINE beschreibt sein theoretisches Kerninteresse als die Untersuchung des Wechselspiels von Struktur, Interaktion und Kultur. In seinem Werk analysiert er die vielfältigen ortsgebundenen Arten und Weisen, in denen Gesellschaft von Menschen in formellen und informellen sozialen Settings verwirklicht wird, angefangen bei Baseballteams über Restaurantküchen oder die Wetterberichterstattung bis hin zum Schachspielen –um nur einige wenige Gegenstände seiner Forschungen zu nennen. Wesentlich beeinflusst durch symbolisch-interaktionistisches Denken und im Rekurs auf weitere wichtige Perspektiven auf soziale Welten plädiert er für eine selbstbewusste Haltung der ethnografischen Forschung und des ethnografischen Schreibens sowie für die Bedeutung der Konzeptarbeit in einer theorie-informierten empirischen Soziologie dessen, was Menschen zusammen tun.Gary Alan FINE is among the most prominent figures in contemporary sociological ethnography worldwide. In this conversation, he talks about influences in his academic career and key intellectual choices. Considered to be a "serial ethnographer" who has worked in multiple settings, his work focuses on small groups and peopled ethnography, as well as on rumors, gossip, and moral story telling in tiny and larger publics. FINE describes his core theoretical interest as residing in the interplay of structure, interaction, and culture and discusses the multiple local ways society is realized by people in formal and informal social settings: ranging from baseball teams, restaurant kitchens, weather reporting to chess players—to name but a few research sites. Influenced by symbolic interactionist thinking and other important approaches to social worlds, he argues for a confident voice of ethnographic research and writing as well as the importance of conceptual work in a theory-informed empirical sociology of what people do together

MELDC: A Reflective Object-Oriented Coordination Language

A coordination language, MELDC, for open systems programming is presented. MELDC is a Cbased, concurrent, distributed object-oriented language built on a reflective architecture. Unlike other language research, the focus of MELDC is not only to study what specific language features should be designed for solving certain open system problems but also to provide programmers a high-level and efficient way to construct new features without modifying the language internals. The key to the reflective feature is the metaclass that supports shadow objects to implement secondary behaviors of objects. Thus, the behavior of an object can be extended by dynamically composing multiple secondary behaviors with the object's primary behavior defined in the class. In this paper, both the MELDC programming model and the reflective architecture are described. Then, we introduce the mechanism of dynamic composition as well as its application in building distributed and persistent systems. In par..

Pointcuts as Functional Queries

Abstract. Most aspect-oriented languages provide only a fixed, built-in set of pointcut designators whose denotation is only described informally. As a consequence, these lan-guages do not provide operations to manipulate or reason about pointcuts beyond weav-ing. In this paper, we investigate the usage of the functional query language XQuery for the specification of pointcuts. Due to its abstraction and module facilities, XQuery enables powerful composition and reusability mechanisms for pointcuts.

Expressive Pointcuts for Increased Modularity

Abstract. In aspect-oriented programming, pointcuts are used to describe cross-cutting structure. Pointcuts that abstract over irrelevant implementation details are clearly desired to better support maintainability and modular reasoning. We present an analysis which shows that current pointcut languages support lo-calization of crosscutting concerns but are problematic with respect to infor-mation hiding. To cope with the problem, we present a pointcut language that exploits information from different models of program semantics, such as the execution trace, the syntax tree, the heap, static type system, etc., and supports abstraction mechanisms analogous to functional abstraction. We show how this raises the abstraction level and modularity of pointcuts and present first steps toward an efficient implementation by means of a static analysis technique.