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 →

“I just thought… ” is one of those phrases whose meaning we think we know, but there are intriguing subtleties in what people do with it in conversation. In a recent article for the journal, Jason Turowetz delved into some of its main uses. Here he gives the background to the story. 

Jason Turowetz

My article on ‘I just thought formulations’ has its origins in a study of speed dating I conducted with a colleague, Matthew Hollander, in 2009, when we were graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It seems a long way back, but that shows how a phenomenon can lodge in your head and inspire a continuing thread of research. Continue reading →

Quite often a ROLSI article touches on a matter than will interest a very wide range of readers, and Gareth Walker‘s account of how acoustic data is represented is a very good example. The range of representations is wide, and not all are equally good for the same things; some may even be misleading. I’m delighted that Gareth has agreed to go into some of the thinking that prompted him to write the piece. Continue reading →