Owning and sharing experiences of adventure: tourism, video and editing practices

My concern in this chapter is not to explore the direct parallel case of bystander videos of dramatic events and how they are shared. My interest is in a form of home movie that has a longer history: the tourist's holiday movie. Its extended lineage usefully downplays what might otherwise seem, from the account above, like an epochal transformation in the sharing of experiences. However there is still novelty here too in that I want to examine the convergence of adventure tourism and videos produced in and from those adventures. Unlike Ethel who, as an ordinary person with a concern with ordinariness (Sacks, 1984), happened upon a grim car crash, adventure tourists are a contemporary form of Simmel's adventurer who goes in search of experiences that have 'something alien, untouchable, out of the ordinary' (Simmel, 2013). There is a desire to participate in and produce the extraordinary and to escape both the job of 'doing being ordinary' and the way of reporting on experiences that accompanies it (Sacks, 1984)

How to feel things with words

A person X says to person Y ‘it’s here”. A common enough thing for someone to say to someone else, and a common enough expression for both to understand, yet professional analysts of language are troubled by what ‘it’s here’ means, it seems of quite a different order to ‘this is a tree’ or ‘if you do not eat meat then you are a vegetarian’. It would not be uncommon for certain logicians or linguists to stay with the words themselves. In staying with the words themselves, cutting away what class, gender or age of person said such words to what other category of person. Cutting away at what time period, in which culture and various other elements. Cutting away, then, most of the context and dealing with the words as if their meaning was internal to themselves. There are two things I should mention about ‘it’s here.’ Firstly, it is a favourite sort of example used to teach what indexicals in language are. Words which we rely on finding their sense by reference to their local use. Words which cause endless troubles for formal logic and for translation software. Secondly, ‘it’s here’, while not a bizarre instance, in fact recognisably and acceptably ordinary, is a made-up example. As a first step in an ethnomethodological direction I would like to shift our attention to some words actually said, come upon in looking for something else. Harvey Sacks throughout his studies of conversation analysis warned his students (and those other colleagues in receipt of his lectures) to avoid beginning with a theory and then either inventing a suitable example or looking for a quote from a transcript to pull out to illustrate it. For the former what any member of your research community views as reasonable provides the limit on suitable examples and for the latter, why bother with ordinary conversation at all

Overtaking as an interactional achievement: video analyses of participants' practices in traffic

In this article we pursue a systematic and extensive study of overtaking in traffic as an interactional event. Our focus is on the accountable organisation and accom- plishment of overtaking by road users in real-world traffic situations. Data and anal- ysis are drawn from multiple research groups studying driving from an ethnometh- odological and conversation analytic perspective. Building on multimodal and se- quential analyses of video recordings of overtaking events, the article describes the shared practices which overtakers and overtaken parties use in displaying, recog- nising and coordinating their manoeuvres. It examines the three sequential phases of an overtaking event: preparation and projection; the overtaking proper; the re- alignment post-phase including retrospective accounts and assessments. We iden- tify how during each of these phases drivers and passengers organise intra-vehicle and inter-vehicle practices: driving and non-driving related talk between vehicle- occupants, the emerging spatiotemporal ecology of the road, and the driving actions of other road users. The data is derived from a two camera set-up recording the road ahead and car interior. The recordings are from three settings: daily commuting, driving lessons, race-car coaching. The events occur on a variety of road types (mo- torways, country roads, city streets, a race track, etc.), in six languages (English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, and Swedish) and in seven countries (Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK). From an exception- ally diverse collection of video data, the study of which is made possible thanks to the innovative collaboration of multiple researchers, the article exhibits the range of practical challenges and communicative skills involved in overtaking.status: Published onlin