The International Conference on Conversation Analysis started in 2002 in Copenhagen, and, following a four-year cycle (shadowing the football World Cup) has been to Helsinki, Mannheim and Los Angeles. This year it came to Loughborough, and was a terrific success, showcasing some 500 presentations and attended by over 600 people from across the globe.

I’m delighted to feature reports of the event, from different perspectives. Below,  Jack Joyce, Linda Walz and Jake Piper give the stewards’ view; and then Jessica Young, reports on her conference tweeting.

Jack Joyce

Linda Walz

Jake Piper

1. The Stewards’ Tale

For a few of the volunteers, ICCA-18 preparation started on the Saturday before the conference with packing around 600 conference bags. This meant, for most, that ICCA was a long, hot and exhausting week; but, if you ask any volunteer (and see the list below*) whether or not they enjoyed it, then the answer would be a resounding ‘yes’. Continue reading →

Graduate students doing EM/CA work in places where there aren’t many others of like mind, can sometimes feel a little isolated. That’s where an association like the EM/CA doctoral network comes into its own. Paula Greenlees reports on the most recent event, held in the elegant rooms of Edinburgh University.

Paula Greenlees, Edinburgh University

On a beautiful spring morning, a group of researchers from across the country and beyond gathered in Edinburgh, the city where Erving Goffman published his first book ‘The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’. Continue reading →

It’s an exciting event when a new journal appears on the scene that immediately sounds appealing. I’m delighted that Brian Due and Kristian Mortensen will tell us about the background to the new Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality, and explain how its online publication makes it exceptionally apt for publishing video and audio data.

Brian Lystgaard Due

Kristian Mortensen

Digital technology has over recent decades had a strong influence on the ways EMCA researchers go about doing their job. Over the years, video and audio data moved from magnetic tape to digital capture; transcriptions were no longer written on typewriters but produced as text files on a desktop; text files could link directly to video files so any segment could be immediately accessed; collections were no longer stored as pieces of papers in folders, but could be organized electronically across different corpora. Continue reading →

Occasionally one comes across a new bit of kit or a new technique which looks immediately enticing and exciting. This is certainly one: Saul Albert reports on his recent Drawing Interactions project that aims to create new graphical techniques and tools for the transcription, analysis and presentation of interaction research.

Saul Albert, Tufts University

Conversation analysts usually show their work using Jeffersonian transcripts with traced outlines or video stills in a ‘film strip’ style. These kinds of graphical transcripts present research for finished publications. But what about the exploratory phases of interaction research such as transcription and collaborative data sessions? Continue reading →

As a featured debate article in ROLSI vol 51(1), I invited Leelo Keevallik to showcase her argument that traditional conceptions of grammar needed to change: to take the body, and its deployment in the unfolding of turns, seriously. I’m delighted that she also accepted an invitation to write a guest blog, reflecting on how she came to this challenging, and tantalising, new conception.

Leelo Keevallik, Linköping University

My training as a linguist started behind the Iron Curtain according to a very traditional philological curriculum and no course literature in English. But I was fascinated by the neat grammatical paradigms, the prudent morphology tables, and the precise categorizations of parts-of-speech. Continue reading →