Guest Blog: Doing CA on hospital wards with front-line healthcare professionals

Conversation analysis offers a great deal to those trying to improve how to communicate with people with disorders of language. It’s not always easy, and practical obstacles keep getting in the way: Isabel Windeatt from Nottingham University gives us a lively account of what it’s like to collect and analyse data on a ward for older people .

Isabel Windeatt

I’ve been working closely with front-line healthcare professionals in my role on the VOICE2 study, a conversation analytic study of communication between staff and people living with dementia who are in hospital. I want to share the benefits of collecting data and sharing preliminary CA analyses with healthcare professionals, as well as some of the challenges, in the hope that others will find solutions to collecting data in challenging environments, and be encouraged to involve healthcare staff during the analysis.

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Guest Blog: Being Smart About Artificial Intelligence

There’s a lot going on at the interface of AI and speech – both recognition and production – and some of it draws on ideas from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. But is it any good? Stuart Reeves runs the rule over some of the issues.

Stuart Reeves, Nottingham

Artificial Intelligence is a big deal now. We’re told that AI systems are reaching and even exceeding human performance at things like playing games, hearing and transcribing words (Xiong et al., 2017), translating between languages, or recognising faces and emotions (Lu and Tang, 2014). This means we are entering a world where it’s possible for people to have conversations with AI agents (a Google researcher recently claimed a chatbot as “sentient”), or get computers to understand what’s in a picture and even generate their own art when prompted.

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Guest blog: Should we share qualitative data?

Conversation analysts soon accumulate many hours of tapes and transcripts; usually these have been collected on the understanding that they are for the researcher’s own use, with permission only to publish extracts anonymously. But should such data be open to other researchers? Jack B. Joyce, Catrin S. Rhys, Bethan Benwell, Adrian Kerrison, Ruth Parry summarise here the arguments examined in a recent paper.

Jack B Joyce, Catrin S Hughes, Bethan Benwell, Adrian Kerrison and Ruth Parry
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Guest Blog: The EMCA Doctoral Network Meetings restart, November 2021

Among the many formal and informal networks that support postgraduates and early-career researchers in CA and ethnomethodology, the EMCA is perhaps the most venerable and global. I’m delighted that two active members, Felicity Slocombe and Andrea Bruun have sent a report on the most recent meeting, November 2021.

The EMCA (Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis) Doctoral event ran every six months, pre-pandemic, with universities taking it in turn to host the event.

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Guest Blog: SPAC, an online space for doing CA in Spanish

CA is well established in a number of Spanish-speaking countries, but there is always room for more initiatives, and for ways for sometimes isolated researchers to meet together. I’m delighted that Luis Manuel Olguín has sent in a report on the Seminario Permanente de Análisis de la Conversación, a lively and inclusive forum for Spanish-speaking CA researchers.

Luis Manuel Olguín, UCLA

Although CA is well-known across Spanish-speaking academia, resources for learning and teaching CA in Spanish are still significantly scant, especially if compared to other approaches to language use and social interaction with established traditions in Spain and Latin America. Similarly, the Spanish-speaking CA community is still relatively small and largely scattered across countries, making it difficult for CA to take root in Language and Social Science programs and departments. 

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Guest Blog: Promoting CA in Brazil

As Conversation Analysis is increasingly taken up by researchers across the world, we are seeing efforts to bring the approach to their wider local communities. There are several initiatives in Brazil, and I’m delighted that Fabio Ferraz de Almeida, currently working in Finland, has sent in this report of an inaugural workshop in Sao Paulo.

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Fabio Ferraz de Almeida

The idea of organising an introductory CA workshop in Brazil began to take shape last year, while I was talking to a colleague, Bruna Gisi, professor of Sociology at the University of São Paulo (USP). Bruna was developing a postgraduate course on EM and Goffman and invited me to participate in one of the lectures. According to her, several sociologists in Brazil often talk about ethnomethodology but they rarely show how to put  it to use. Her suggestion was that we  discuss a particular EM concept and show how to ‘apply’ it in empirical research. 

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Guest Blog: Using inclusive language when transcribing French data

Every language poses it own problems when transcribing from the spoken to the written word. In this guest blog, I’m delighted that Dennis Dressel, Wifek Bouaziz and Marie Klatt, all at the University of Freiburg, take us through the dilemma of transcribing French, with its convention of treating plurals as masculine, while also trying to respect inclusivity. How does the transcriber acknowledge references to females when the language conventionally refers to them as male?

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Guest Blog:  Building an EMCA community at CADSS

Groups of EM/CA analysts have sprung up all over the world to share expertise, pore over data together, bounce ideas off each other and provide a sense of shared community. Here Simon Stewart gives an enthusiastic account of recent developments of the group based on the south coast of England.

Simon Stewart, Southampton

This post is intended to share with the CA community some of the resources and learning that have come from our group, CA Data Sessions South (CADSS), in its first 18 months.

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