122 research outputs found
New Technology and Tools to Enhance Collaborative Video Analysis in Live ‘Data Sessions’
The live ‘data session’ is arguably a significant collaborative practice amongst a group of co-present colleagues that has sustained the fermentation of emerging analyses of interactional phenomena in ethnomethodological conversation analysis for several decades. There has not, however, been much in the way of technological innovation since its inception. In this article, I outline how the data session can be enhanced (a) by using simple technologies to support the ‘silent data session’, (b) by developing software tools to present, navigate and collaborate on new types of video data in novel ways using immersive virtual reality technologies, and (c) by supporting distributed version control to nurture the freedom and safety to collaborate synchronously and asynchronously on the revision of a common transcript used in a live data session. Examples of real cases, technical solutions and best practices are given based on experience. The advantages and limitations of these significant enhancements are discussed in methodological terms with an eye to future developments
Dialogue and the machine: an interactional perspective on computer dialogue models, mediation and artifacts
The topic of this thesis is the notion of dialogue and how machines have not only influenced
the development of our understanding of this fundamental human social activity but also the
possibilities for engaging in mediated dialogue. In particular, the concern is with its adoption
and distortion from a computational point of view. An interactional perspective is developed
that provides insight into the problems and limitations of computer dialogue models, motivates
the investigation of the achievement of dialogue mediated 'through' machines, and informs
the conception and design of computer systems (or artifacts) that support the metaphor of
dialogue 'with' machines.
To motivate a reconstruction of the notion of dialogue and a different understanding of the
status of machines in terms of action, a critical analysis of computer models of dialogue,
concerning theory, data and implementation, is given. In general, computer models lack a
consideration of interaction as a constitutive domain, assume the interchange model of
dialogue, promote a sanitised view of data, and are a poor foundation for the design of
machines that are to engage in dialogue-like behaviour with a user. An alternative
interactional perspective is derived from hermeneutics and ethnomethodology in which it is
argued that the machine is an intelligible - not intelligent - artifact, and communicative activity
is circumstantial, situated and interactively constituted. Instead of reifying dialogue as the
repeated exchange of discrete messages between isolated cognitive processors (the
interchange model), dialogue is understood here to be the collection of practices in which
parties are mutually engaged in coordinating communicative actions and achieving shared
understanding out of the materials at hand. The empirical methodology of the thesis comes
from conversation analysis and forms the basis for the investigation of the achievement of
dialogue 'through' machines.
A detailed audio-visual study of a particular computer-mediated communication modality is
presented. Parties engaged in cooperatively constructing mutual orientation in dialogue (in
a virtual dialogue space) were recorded and features of their conduct were rendered for
analysis with the aid of a notation system specially developed for this study. The findings
are that the computer-mediated dialogue activity is a skilled, interactive accomplishment in
which dialogic presence, monitoring and participation are contingently created and
maintained. An emergent transformation of the dialogue activity demonstrates the situated
work of constructing participation, a process that is shaped by the dynamics of that activity.
A brief study of copresent collaboration documents two further features: the embodiment of
actions and their complementarity. The consequences of the interactional perspective and
the empirical study for computer models and dialogue 'with' machines are discussed.
Suggestions are also made about an alternative use of computer modelling for dialogue
'between' machines, and about the future of dialogue mediation and artifacts
BreachingVR: A Simple VR Software Demonstration to Reconstruct Harold Garfinkel's Inverting Lenses Tutorial Exercise
The article reports on a simple working demonstration in virtual reality (VR) of the inverting lenses tutorial exercise by the sociologist Harold Garfinkel. A user wearing a virtual reality headset can vertically invert their visual perception of the physical world around them (via the video camera pass-through) or invert their perception of a virtual world in which the user can pick up virtual objects and use virtual tools
First Steps from Walking in Snow to Cross-Country Skiing: An Interactional Perspective on Ephemeral Surfaces for Personal Mobility
This article investigates the ways in which a young child learns to sense and move through a transient environment while learning to walk on skis. Audiovisual recordings were made of a parent instructing a child on how to walk on snow and to start moving on skis. Focusing on social interaction, the article examines how snow is sensed and made salient in spatio-interactional practices of walking on snow for the purposes of learning to ski. Talk about the weather and snow surface conditions while walking over the snow develops the child’s feeling for snow as a surface for personal mobility
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