Guest Blog: Report on IPrA (2) – Transcribing non-English and English data

In the second of our guest blogs on the huge IPrA conference, Mark Dingemanse sends in this comprehensive and thoughtful report on one of the liveliest of the discussion Panels – how languages other than English fare in the research community.

Transcribing talk-in-interaction in languages other than English

Dingemanse foto

Mark Dingemanse, MPI Nijmegen

Testifying to the power of CA methods and insights, a growing number of researchers study the empirical details of talk-in-interaction in languages other than English.

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Abstracts for Issue 48(3)

This issue of the journal features a debate about the automatic transcription of speech, and a series of articles on a wide variety of topics, ranging from the particle “or” at turn endings to the deployment of facial gesture to influence the course of a conversation. I’ve set out the Abstracts below, and the journal’s page can be accessed here. Continue reading →

Guest Blog: reports on IPrA 2015 (1)

I’m delighted to introduce a series of short guest blogs written by friends of ROLSI who were at the Antwerp IPrA conference, and took active roles in Panels and presentations. I’ll be publishing their reflections in a series over the next couple of weeks.

We start with a report by two early-career researchers on their experiences of one of the linguistics world’s largest international meetings, then a report on a panel of papers reporting research on “change-of-state” tokens. Continue reading →

Who ROLSI authors cite, and who cites ROLSI authors

Thomson-Reuters Web of Science generates a great deal of statistical information about journals, and one pair of stats might be of interest to ROLSI readers. Who (or rather which journals) do ROLSI authors cite? and who returns the favour?

This graphical image, taken from the Web of Science data on ROLSI, needs some decoding, but it illustrates some interesting points. Continue reading →

Guest Blog: Researching autism with Conversation Analysis

Conversation Analysis (CA) is a particularly attractive research tool for investigating the communication of people with autism: its careful, moment-by-moment method picks up just how it is that their interactional moves fail (and succeed). In this very welcome guest blog, Tom Muskett explains the promises of CA in working with the complexities of this often distressing disorder.

Tom Muskett, now at Leeds Beckett University

Tom Muskett, now at Leeds Beckett University

I was a speech and language therapist with an interest in working with children on the autism spectrum. By definition, this diagnosis is associated with so-called deficits in social interaction and communication, but I had become increasingly dissatisfied with the accepted representations of these, particularly within research and clinical writing.

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Guest Blog: Synthesising EM and CA

In this guest blog, two enterprising young researchers, Fabio Ferraz de Almeida and Joe Ford, grapple with the slippery combination of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. They ask: for a given research topic, which bits of each does one use?

Fabio Ferraz de Almeida and Joe Ford, Loughborough University

Fabio Ferraz de Almeida and Joe Ford, Loughborough University

Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (hereafter EMCA) have a long history of being used to examine social (inter)action in institutional environments. Moreover, they are also frequently used as a way of re-examining topics that have been previously studied using other approaches. This synthesis can yield a number of benefits – for the institutions, for our understanding of the topics and, of course, for EMCA.

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Latest Citation Impact Factor Scores

Every year about this time Thompson-Reuters publishes a complete listing of academic journals’ citation record over the past two years. That is to say, how much the articles in a given journal have been cited in other articles (see footnote).

I’m delighted to say that ROLSI continues to be among the top journals in our end of the social sciences, and indeed has increased its rating. We now have a citation impact score of 2.90.

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Guest blog: research on racist talk

Some societal ills seem to lie beyond the reach of interactional analysis – but in this topical and thoughtful guest blog, Jessica Robles gives us an insight into how an interaction analyst might tackle the complex issue of racism as a research topic.

Robles

Jessica Robles, University of Washington

I never thought I’d write on racism. My research interests do revolve around morality, but generally of a much more mundane, less contentious sort—for example, using vagueness in doing disagreement, and the demands of praising gifts.

I stumbled into looking at racism by accident. Over the years I’ve collected “favorite” bits of interactional data that I repeatedly inflict on data session attendees and students. In one such snippet, a participant makes a categorical reference to Mexicans that she (mid-utterance) attempts to “take back,” apparently because the recipient has a Mexican boyfriend.

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Guest Blog: Conversation Analysis at the Royal Institution

CA researchers have given talks all over the world, but few can have done so in a venue as venerable as the Royal Institution. Liz Stokoe, whose work has rightly gained a world-wide following (see for example her TEDx talk) reports on her experiences as the first scholar of  interaction to be invited into its historic lecture theatre

RI small (21)In May 2015, I was invited to present a Royal Institution ‘Friday Evening Discourse’. The Royal Institution’s most famous lecture series is probably the Christmas Lectures, but the Discourses have been running since 1825. They were started by English scientist Michael Faraday, and most “eminent scientists” have presented one. Continue reading →