Video analysis and the temporality of inscriptions within social interaction: the case of architects at work

This article shows how artefacts – and more specifically documents and visualizations such as images, maps and plans – can be analysed in detail within an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective focusing on the way in which they are manipulated within social activities. The aim is double. On the one hand, the article deals with the way in which the temporal and interactional feature of inscriptions in interaction can be preserved and analysed on the basis of video data, highlighting some of the challenges of producing adequate video recordings and video transcriptions of these phenomena. On the other hand, the article offers an empirical study of a professional activity in which participants manipulate texts, plans and other visualizations. Thus, it analyses in detail a meeting video recorded in an architectural office, in which three architects read, discuss, and draw plans, as well as explore and discover ideas by formulating, gesticulating, and sketching them.

[1]  Charles Goodwin.  Recording Human Interaction in Natural Settings , 1993 .

[2]  Albena Yaneva,et al.  The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture , 2009 .

[3]  Louis L. Bucciarelli,et al.  Designing Engineers , 1994 .

[4]  Kjeld Schmidt,et al.  Ordering Systems: Coordinative Practices and Artifacts in Architectural Design and Planning , 2004, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

[5]  C. Shalizi.  The Domestication of the Savage Mind , 2009 .

[6]  Anne Warfield Rawls.  Garfinkel’s Conception of Time , 2005 .

[7]  B. Street.  Literacy in Theory and Practice , 1984 .

[8]  Christian Heath,et al.  Tasks-in-interaction: paper and screen based documentation in collaborative activity , 1992, CSCW '92.

[9]  C Heath,et al.  Preserving the consultation: medical record cards and professional conduct. , 1982, Sociology of health & illness.

[10]  Lorenza Mondada,et al.  Video Recording as the Reflexive Preservation and Configuration of Phenomenal Features for Analysis , 2006 .

[11]  Jeffrey D. Robinson,et al.  Correspondence Among Patients' Self-Reports, Chart Records, and Audio/Videotapes of Medical Visits , 2003, Health communication.

[12]  Curtis Dale LeBaron.  Building communication : architectural gestures and the embodiment of new ideas , 1998 .

[13]  Dominique Vinck,et al.  Everyday Engineering. An ethnography of Design and Innovation , 2003 .

[14]  L. Mondada.  Production du savoir et interactions multimodales : Une étude de la modélisation spatiale comme activité pratique située et incarnée , 2008 .

[15]  Eric Livingston.  An anthropology of reading , 1996 .

[16]  C. Goodwin.  Practices of Color Classification , 2000 .

[17]  Donald Matheson.  Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication , 2002 .

[18]  C. Heath,et al.  Body movement and speech in medical interaction: Postscript: the use of medical records and computers during the consultation , 1986 .

[19]  Lorenza Mondada.  Visions controversées de la carte: construire le visible par les gestes et la parole en interaction , 2005 .

[20]  Bonnie Cuthbert.  Video Analysis , 2009, Encyclopedia of Database Systems.

[21]  A. Kendon.  Conducting Interaction: Patterns of Behavior in Focused Encounters , 1990 .

[22]  P. Auer.  Projection in Interaction and Projection in Grammar , 2005 .

[23]  Albena Yaneva,et al.  Citations (this article cites 5 articles hosted on the SAGE Journals Online and HighWire Press platforms): , 2022 .

[24]  Anita M. Pomerantz.  Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes , 1984 .

[25]  Françoise Détienne,et al.  Méthodologies d'analyse de situations coopératives de conception : Corpus MOSAIC , 2009 .

[26]  L. Mondada.  Documenter l'articulation des ressources multimodales dans le temps : la transcription d'enregistrements vidéos d'interactions , 2008 .

[27]  H. Garfinkel,et al.  I.1 The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar , 1981 .

[28]  C. Goodwin.  Vision and Inscription in Practice , 2000 .

[29]  Jürgen Streeck,et al.  Interaction by inscription , 2001 .

[30]  Jürgen Streeck,et al.  How to do things with things , 1996 .

[31]  Jack Whalen,et al.  Organisation, Interaction and Practice: The work of the work order: document practice in face-to-face service encounters , 2010 .

[32]  Christian Heath,et al.  Documents and professional practice: “bad” organisational reasons for “good” clinical records , 1996, CSCW '96.

[33]  Kathryn Henderson,et al.  On Line and On Paper: Visual Representations, Visual Culture, and Computer Graphics in Design Engineering , 1998 .

[34]  P. Drew.  When Documents ‘Speak’: Documents, Language and Interaction , 2006 .

[35]  N. Barber,et al.  Same evidence, different meanings: Transformation of textual evidence in hospital new drugs committees , 2006 .

[36]  Dang X. Cu,et al.  Architecture: The Story of Practice , 1991 .

[37]  L. Mondada.  Emergent focused interactions in public places: A systematic analysis of the multimodal achievement of a common interactional space , 2009 .

[38]  Mary Elizabeth Lynch,et al.  The externalized retina: Selection and mathematization in the visual documentation of objects in the life sciences , 1988 .

[39]  Jonas Ivarsson,et al.  Developing the construction sight: Architectural education and technological change , 2010 .

[40]  Keith M. Murphy,et al.  Collaborative imagining: The interactive use of gestures, talk, and graphic representation in architectural practice , 2005 .

[41]  Jeffrey D. Robinson.  Getting Down to Business Talk, Gaze, and Body Orientation During Openings of Doctor‐Patient Consultations , 1998 .

[42]  Helen Lomax,et al.  Recording Social Life: Reflexivity and Video Methodology , 1998 .

[43]  Christine Reid,et al.  The Myth of the Paperless Office , 2003, J. Documentation.

[44]  Roz Ivanic,et al.  Situated literacies : reading and writing in context , 2000 .

[45]  Lucy Suchman,et al.  Making a case: knowledge and routine work in document production. , 2000 .

[46]  Lorenza Mondada,et al.  Commentary: transcript variations and the indexicality of transcribing practices , 2007 .

[47]  Lorenza Mondada,et al.  Using Video for a Sequential and Multimodal Analysis of Social Interaction: Videotaping Institutional Telephone Calls , 2008 .

[48]  Elinor Ochs,et al.  Interaction and grammar: “When I come down I'm in the domain state”: grammar and graphic representation in the interpretive activity of physicists , 1996 .

[49]  Daniel V. Lawless,et al.  When up is down and down is up: Body orientation, proximity, and gestures as resources , 2002, Language in Society.

[50]  D. Vinck.  Les objets intermédiaires dans les réseaux de coopération scientifique. Contribution à la prise en compte des objets dans les dynamiques sociales , 1999 .

[51]  Ola Söderström,et al.  Des images pour agir : le visuel en urbanisme , 2000 .

[52]  Rod Watson.  Analysing Practical and Professional Texts: A Naturalistic Approach , 2009 .

[53]  Gustav Lymer.  Demonstrating Professional Vision: The Work of Critique in Architectural Education , 2009 .

[54]  L. Mondada.  The conversation analytic approach to data collection , 2012 .

[55]  C. Goodwin.  Action and embodiment within situated human interaction , 2000 .

[56]  László Moholy-Nagy,et al.  Vision in Motion , 2006 .

[57]  Monika Büscher,et al.  Social Life Under the Microscope , 2005 .

[58]  B. Latour.  Visualization and cognition: thinking with eyes and hands , 1986 .

[59]  S. Woolgar,et al.  Representation in Scientific Practice , 1990 .

[60]  R. Layard,et al.  Time for action. , 1983, Nursing mirror.