A corpus of naturalistic audio and video recordings of people’s spontaneous interactions as they lean over the balcony of the Turbine Hall, watching and often discussing the action on the floor below during the exhibition of artist Tino Sehgal‘s piece These Associations.
The project aims to build a corpus of data to enable a study (as a component of my PhD with Pat Healey) of the ways people negotiate, assess and account for their experiences and understandings in this context through conversational interaction.
The Tate Modern in London is the most visited gallery in the world, its 3400 square meter Turbine Hall, a vast concrete and steel cuboid chamber, has hosted a large-scale annual contemporary art commission since the gallery opened in the year 2000. Over 20,000 people can visit on a peak day, mostly in small groups, almost all passing through the Turbine Hall, talking and interacting while moving between the restaurants, lecture theatres, shops or the exhibitions held in more conventional gallery spaces on the upper floors.
In 2012 artist Tino Sehgal was commissioned to create an artwork for the Turbine Hall entitled These Associations. Sehgal, a trained choreographer, recruited over 200 paid participants and trained them to perform a series of group movements on the ground floor of the Hall, such as ‘flocking’ and other rule-constrained movements. From July-October 2012, up to 60 participants at a time were employed throughout the opening hours of the gallery to alternate between blending into the crowd, then performing movement sequences, sometimes breaking away from the group to engage visitors in unscripted conversations.
Recordings were made of whoever gathered next to the “recording in progress” sign on the first floor balcony of the Turbine Hall.
The recordings did not capture conversations between participants and visitors or focus on those who were directly involved in the piece itself. Instead, a microphone was placed in the centre of the balcony on the first floor of the Turbine Hall. When people came and stood next to the microphone, overlooking the hall and talked, often watching the action on the floor below, we were able to capture their responses to this context interleaved with other topics and issues.
Sehgal has requested that his work is not documented photographically, and I have agreed not to show photographs or video of the piece in my research presentations. However, photography by members of the public was not prohibited during the piece, and Ann Jones has done a nicely illustrated write-up here.
Explaining research that uses conversation analysis to people with strong leanings towards quantitative methods is hard. I find they often fixate on a few methodological issues and never get round to discussing the research itself.
Earlier this term I gave an intentionally provocative talk about conversation analysis (CA) and its use in Cognitive Science, to see what kinds of issues came out of the woodwork very strongly. It certainly worked – I got quite a vigorous and enjoyable smackdown from my colleagues, and although I wasn’t very well equipped to deal with it at the time, I got my wish of an enumerated set of these questions that fell into three broad categories.
I took these categories and developed a short presentation entitled “conversation analysis for geeks” that in future I will prepend to my presentations to try and deal with these issues before diving into my research material.
The issues outlined below are interesting ones though, and looking at them in a bit more detail has helped me to understand why it’s important to make the case for interactional analysis, rather than – as I’ve seen done very skilfully by some researchers – try to skirt or minimise these issues in presentations using rhetorically compelling, persuasive but methodologically unchallenging evidence.
Quantification
People in my research environment are very familiar with quantification and statistical significance as ways of explaining human action and cognition, almost to the point of prejudice about other forms of explanation. This is a well established problem, that both Emmanuel Schegloff and Paul ten Have have addressed at length. Unfortunately, I often have 15-20 minutes to present, and doubt I could get people to read these texts beforehand!
I’ve heard some researchers deal with this issue by invoking the word “qualitative” and “ethnography” to explain what they’re doing. However, I think this is an unsatisfying compromise. Calling what I’m doing qualitative ethnography makes it sound like I’m studying social groups and their cultures, whereas I’m studying the ethno-methods they use to articulate and negotiate their groupness and their environment. So this compromise feels unsatisfying in the context I’m working in because this misunderstanding gives rise to others – such as the common complaint that CA obsesses over obvious trivialities. These ethno-methods obviously would seem trivial if the object of study was the sociology of a specific culture as a whole, rather than the generalisable methods of how a culture is articulated through interaction.
I think it’s worth arguing this because there are actually compelling reasons for making strong claims about how these methods are generalisable, and working with quantitative methodologies to demonstrate that. For example, recent developments in CA such as Stivers et. al’s study of cultural variation in turn-taking use statistics very interestingly. Turn-taking, probably the most well-developed conversation analytic device, features as a motivating hypothesis for a statistical study of cultural variations. My sense is that this kind of CA-centric mixed methods collaboration is only possible because the empirical basis of CA is taken seriously as a systematic and formal analytical basis for the project.
Practical vs. theoretical reasoning
Or proof practices vs. logical proofs.
There are a few keywords that are real traps preventing interdisciplinary understanding. Although Cognitive Science is an interdisciplinary field, use of terms like ‘proof’ and ‘reasoning’ seem to trip my presentations up very easily. When I’ve presented sequences of talk as evidence of for analysis, I’ve had complaints that: “that’s evidence of interaction, not reasoning”. The problem seems to be that in Cognitive Science ‘reasoning’ necessarily implies a cognitive view of a mind as an abstract computing system, so ‘reasoning’ in this context is a private process, in the same way that ‘proof’ in Cognitive Science and a CS engineering context denotes formal, logical proof.
Again, not using this language at all, or trying to persuade people by avoiding the issue makes it hard to communicate the relevance of results to the interdisciplinary (but quantitatively/logically oriented) field of Cognitive Science. It may seem obvious that there are methodological differences and tensions between a cognitivist and phenomenological approach to studying human behaviour and action, but my experience of this research context is that methodological issues tend to be skirted for pragmatic, political and professional reasons.
Talking about ‘practical reasoning’ is the best way I’ve found to describe the way participants in conversation analyse the evidence available to them (whatever utterance or action occurred previously) to figure out what might be their relevant next action. Similarly, I’ve tried talking about ‘proof practices’ to describe the way participants in a conversation challenge and cross-check theirs and others’ social actions to establish the accuracy of their analysis. I’m not sure that these work – but again, it seems important to retain these terms to be able to make a claims about cognitive phenomena.
A good example of this is Celia Kitzinger’s article After post-cognitivism in which she writes about the convergence of conversation analysis and discursive psychology as interaction-analytical methods with something to say about cognitive science. As Stivers et. al. actually put into practice in their statistical paper, Kitzinger recommends using strong interactional evidence from CA to guide hypotheses that can form the basis of research with more quantitative methods – or in her case – cognitive models and simulations in computer and cognitive science.
Topical authority
This seems to me to be the strangest issue, perhaps because my training in aesthetics leads me to just assume that people have authority over their own expressions of likes and dislikes. I’m studying how people do these expressions – how they agree and disagree with each other over aesthetic assessments, but I’ve had people complain that if I want to find out about art, I should interview curators or experts instead of listening to what ‘ordinary people’ have to say about it.
I’m not quite sure what to make of this complaint – or how to react to it. It just seems obvious to me that what experts or people involved in aesthetic production say around their objects of professional aesthetic speculation and how they interact around them will be very different from the ways that people talk while walking around galleries or chatting about art and artists at home or at work. I’m interested in the latter – although I’m sure there’s a lot to be learned form both – and their intersections.
I think this question is informed again by a cognitivist theory of art that I recognise from Cognitive Science approaches to aesthetics, exemplified by this one from the introduction to “Aesthetic Science” by A. Shimamura.
From Shimamura, A. P., & Palmer, S. E. (Eds.). (2012). Aesthetic science: Connecting minds, brains, and experience. Oxford University Press, pp 24.
In this model of artistic communication, art is seen as an intentional state in the mind of the artist communicated to the beholder via the artwork: ie. art as (a certain kind of) thought. This amounts to a kind of transmission theory of art based on a familiar idea in communication theory – that a cognate concept is encoded in speech signals then decoded back into a concept in the mind of the hearer.
Informed by this understanding, it makes sense that if you want to find out about art, you go as close to the source – the mind of the artist – as possible, rather than the ‘decode’ side, where, presumably, the viewer or recipient has to contend with errors in ideation produced by the cognitive decoding process as well as any noise that may have been introduced to the signal.
I guess dealing with this issue is the entire subject of my PhD so might be quite a challenge to condense.
Other questions and misunderstandings
Speaking to Jon Hindmarsh at the fantastic summer institute he and his colleagues at King’s College run on video and the analysis of social interaction, he added the following from his experience of using and presenting qualitative video analysis in the context of sociology, anthropology and ethnography.
He said he gets complaints that:
Video recordings skew people’s natural behaviour
‘Fly on the wall’ video recordings are ethically unsound
Perhaps as these fields are closer to the origins of these methodologies in sociology, these issues more familiar to researchers. I’ve not experienced these personally, probably because I haven’t used video in my analysis, and perhaps there’s an assumption that audio recordings will skew people’s behaviour less (not that I’ve noticed it in my recordings or the data I’ve collected from the Audio BNC). I have no idea why fly-on-the wall recordings might be ethically unsound if the data is treated carefully, but it sounds as though the issue may be more ideological than practical.
——-
I’m interested in hearing about other questions and misconceptions from other fields, and what strategies conversation analysis and ethnomethodology researchers are using to deal with them – or skirt around them in ways that don’t compromise their empirical claims.
I’ve built dozens of websites over the years – both professionally and as part of artistic, research, teaching, or freelance projects. I’m still very proud of some of them and would like to show them to people and link to them. Other people have also linked to them extensively over the years, and those inbound links are useful.
The problem is that keeping all this stuff online takes maintenance and often causes headaches. I think I found a 10 second technical solution that I hope it doesn’t annoy the good people at archive.org.
Quick how-to:
Find the best possible instance of your website on archive.org’s wayback machine.
Create two redirect rule on your web server, one to block archive.org’s archiving script, and one to redirect all otehr traffic to archive.org
Breakdown:
Finding the best instance of your website
Archive.org indexes your website with varying regularity. You might want their latest version – but it doesn’t just depend on your website. Archive.org archives the environment of your site too.
There may be other websites that went offline before your site – if you link to the latest version that archive.org has, it may be that links out of your site are therefore dead or linking to domain squatters that moved in when people you linked to moved out.
The solution to this is to use archive.org’s time navigation bar to find the ‘optimum’ time at which your site, and it’s significant neighbours was in it’s heydey. Use this as the basis of the apache redirect rule.
Redirect rules
Most web servers allow you to define redirect rules. I use Apache. Apache provides you with several ways of doing this. You can either create redirect rules in your Apache configuration files via your sites-available, or add them to an .htaccess file in the root directory of your domain.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
# if it's archive.org trying to archive itself
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ia_archiver
RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]
# otherwise redirect to archive.org
RewriteRule (.*) http://web.archive.org/web/20061205014515/http://twenteenthcentury.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>
Thoughts?
I’d be interested to know what archive.org thinks of this use of their service. It seems such an obvious solution to a very widespread problem.
So many of my artist friends – particularly those who developed their own web skills for artistic purposes – now spend inordinate amounts of time keeping their websites alive across server and database incompatibilities, changes in the programming languages they used to create their services, and various other headaches.
This isn’t ideal – obviously the services can’t run on archive.org, and sadly, some of the more interesting bits of work I did were not very friendly to web crawlers so didn’t provide archive.org with much to go on, but that’s a good pointer for future work: make sure that your web projects are easily crawled by archive.org so you don’t have to sysadmin it for the rest of time.
I think this is a fair paraphrase of Eric Kandel’s reasoning:
Following Alois Riegl, Art History should focus more on the psychology of aesthetic response.
Renaissance Art is “inner-directed”, whereas the Dutch Masters and later works enlist the viewer’s perspective and perceptual participation.
Ernst Kris and maybe also Ernst Gombrich ground this psychological aesthetic participation in evidence of perceptual illusions.
Authors of great works of art exploit these devices to create ambiguous interpretations and engimatic emotional effects.
Through solving these visual puzzles, the viewer performs a diminished version of the same creative act in visual interpretation that the artist performs dramatically in visual production.
This view of the creative synthesis and interpretation of ambiguous perceptual data can help us understand cognition.
This account seems to rely on a theory that visual phenomena can be encoded by the artist and reconstructed as different but to some extent equivalent mental images in the mind of the viewer, and that the artist that paints and the viewer that views are doing the same or an equivalent activity, but to different degrees. This makes it a kind of information theory of artistic communication, and subject to the same kinds of empirical criticisms.
In the last week or so BBC Radio 4 had two very different takes on the valuation of art from two sides of the psychology/sociology fence that made a striking illustration of the differences between experimental and observational approaches to the question of art’s monetary valuation.
The second was an experiment on yesterday’s episode of a fun new series called The Human Zoo by Prof. Nick Chater in which people were invited to guess the value of artworks – either as individual guessers or as groups. The punchline: individuals guess lower than groups, but everyone underestimates dramatically.
The Human Zoo experiment – designed to respond to the programme’s theme of ‘groupthink’ – involved flashing up images of “great works of art”, and asking people to guess the price they sold for. Participants were allowed to form groups or guess as individuals, and that group-or-individual condition was the variable under scrutiny. When I mailed him a link to the Christian Heath interview, Nick Chater – the Human Zoo’s resident behavioural scientist said the experiment was intended primarily as a fun way to see how groups can produce more extreme outcomes than their members.
Heath’s interview highlights the competitive dynamics of the auction: how the interactions between bidders are conventionally orchestrated as a two-party conflict, and how the auctioneer winds up the punters and wields the gavel in ways that are carefully designed to inflate the sales price of the lot.
I suspect that if they’d introduced a process of competitive speculation on prices into the experiment, even without the wily auctioneer figure, the underestimates would have been far less dramatic.
Neither of these studies (unfair as it is to compare a fun radio show test to the research findings in an august academic publication), are intended to deal with the kinds of generalised, everyday processes of aesthetic disagreement that I’m writing my PhD on, although there are some interesting snippets of conversation audible in the Human Zoo report: “I was thinking about zero – some random pastiche of pop art, probably zero”.
It’s also interesting to hear the kinds of extrapolations about counteracting ‘groupthink’ effects by looking to ‘optimal’ decision making frameworks including anonymous voting that are drawn from the experiment later in the programme.
There are systems of decision-making like this in processes of art making and art-appreciation. Some prizes include an ‘audience award’ that is voted on, and some funding committees vote, while others rely on expert panel discussion or curatorial caprice – but the character and effects of these different processes and situations of decision-making on how aesthetic value is constructed and expressed are rarely scrutinised in their interactional detail.
Following Rod Munday’sSacks Lexicon, and in the interests of demystifying what can seem like an impenetrable field of technical Conversation Analysis (CA) terminology, I’m assembling a glossary of CA terms that crop up repeatedly in papers and seem useful for getting to grips with the basic methodology.
Quotes:
By recipient design we refer to a multitude of respects in which the talk by a party in a conversation is constructed or designed in ways which display an orientation and sensitivity to the particular other(s) who are the co-participants.
Although reference and relevance are related topical issues, knowledge of the referent is not sufficient for establishing relevance. An object referenced not only has to be recognizable, but also has to be transformed into an object for this conversation, for these participants, a feature that Sacks et al. (1974:727) call “recipient design.”
Recipient design is a very useful analytical term that could be well applied to fields beyond CA – to refer to any shaping of an action for an intended recipient. It’s a particularly useful term to use in the study of interaction because it focuses analysis on the demonstrable competences, knowledge and situational awareness of the interactants themselves.
A live game-show where the audience makes up the rules.
Who Wants to Be…? is a live multi-media game-show where the audience makes up all the rules on the fly. Inspired by legal scholar Peter Suber’s ‘Nomic’ game of self-amendment the show provides a crowd with an ‘ask-the-audience’ voting system, and facilitates discussions and voting on how to modify the rule-making system of the game as they play it – including how to spend the box-office takings. Each new audience has both shaped the gameplay for the next, and on different occasions have voted to collectively buy a woodland in Wales, purchase a generator for a Zambian health clinic, or even plant 3000 trees in the Colombian Amazon.
Of course I could just use a WYSIWYG text editor like LibreOffice – but now I’ve experienced the power of LaTeX for document preparation and publication, I really can’t see myself going back.
When doing CA it seems particularly important to have transcriptions legibly in the body of the paper and visible during the writing process, because many of the analytical observations come, or get significantly modified at the point of writing about them, double and triple checking assumptions, and cross-referencing with the CA literature while tweaking citations.
My chosen solution: Markdown + Pandoc
Markdown is my favourite lightweight markup language, a highly readable format with which you can write a visually pleasing text file, which you can then convert into almost any other format – HTML, OpenOffice, LaTeX, RTF, etc. using Pandoc. There are many similar systems, notably reStructuredText and Textile, all of which you can use to write your text file, and other conversion tools/toolsets, but in my experience, Markdown and Pandoc are the most useful combination in an academic context 1.
There are lots of great things about markdown:
Just edit simple text files – no weird file formats to get corrupted or mangled.
Less verbose and complicated-looking than LaTeX.
Small files are easy to share/collaborate on with others (everyone gets to use their favourite editor).
There are some great pandoc plugins for my favourite text editor vim.
However, the best thing is that, used along with the XeTeX typesetting engine, it solves the problem with CA transcriptions being unreadable in LaTeX/pdflatex.
For example, in my first CA-laced paper, my transcriptions looked like this in my LaTeX source:
\begin{table*}[!ht]
\hfill{}
\texttt{
\begin{tabular}{@{}p{2mm}p{2mm}p{150mm}@{}}
& D: & 0:h (I k-)= \\
& A: & =Dz that make any sense to you? \\
& C: & Mn mh. I don' even know who she is. \\
& A: & She's that's, the Sister Kerrida, \hspace{.3mm} who, \\
& D: & \hspace{76mm}\raisebox{0pt}[0pt][0pt]{ \raisebox{2.5mm}{[}}'hhh \\
& D: & Oh \underline{that's} the one you to:ld me you bou:ght.= \\
& C: & \hspace{2mm}\raisebox{0pt}[0pt][0pt]{ \raisebox{2.5mm}{[}} Oh-- \hspace{42mm}\raisebox{0pt}[0pt][0pt]{ \raisebox{2mm}{\lceil}} \\
& A: & \hspace{60.2mm}\raisebox{0pt}[0pt][0pt]{ \raisebox{3.1mm}{\lfloor}}\underline{Ye:h} \\
\end{tabular}
\hfill{}
}
\caption{ Evaluation of a new artwork from (JS:I. -1) \cite[p.78]{Pomerantz1984} .}
\label{ohprefix}
\end{table*}
which renders this:
In Markdown for my latest paper, the CA bits look like this:
There is a small amount of control sacrificed here – possibly for unicode XeTeX or font issues – I’m not sure yet – I don’t get to render the nicely stretched ceiling characters for overlap marking, or the raised full stop / bullet operator for inbreaths, but normal full stops and square brackets work reasonably well.
Overall, I think the Markdown version represents a significant improvement in legibility. I think it might be possible to do the same in LaTeX using the {verbatim} environment, but the fact that Markdown also lets me concentrate on writing without throwing errors or refusing to compile lets me spend longer on the writing than on endless text-fiddling procrastination.
When it comes to rendering, I feed my markdown file to pandoc:
I use a citation style language file to customise how my bibliographical references are rendered, and it pops out looking like I slaved over the LaTeX for hours.
Notes:
Not all of these systems support bibliographical references with BibTeX – Markdown + Pandoc does this quite elegantly ↩
I am writing a thesis entitled “Accounting for Taste, the Pragmatics of Aesthetic Assessments in Conversation”. The project is to show how people ‘do’ aesthetics interactionally; how they express and negotiate about their tastes, how they describe the world and make certain aspects of it intelligible to themselves and one another as aesthetic resources.
(Not) Defining Aestheics
One of the initial problems is coming up with a useful sense of what ‘aesthetics’ means in this context. Starting with negative definition: I am not talking about the discourse of aesthetics that evaluates art and cultural artefacts in a way that would be recognisable to Art History. What I am doing is looking at concrete examples of people negotiating about issues of personal taste and trying to see how they are accomplishing those interactions.
Various existing attempts have been made to do something a bit like this – notably by Heath, Luff and vom Lehn in their studies of the ostensibly aesthetic context of museums 1.
These studies have thrown a fascinating light on how visitors to museums and galleries negotiate their attention to and awareness of these contexts. Some of their most elegant findings show, based on close observation of video recordings, how visitors’ body position and gaze indicate that their experience is constituted by a continuous and fragmentary noticing of multiple objects, artworks and other visitors. The kind of singular, fixed-position spectatorship of one object at a time that curators and artists may assume to be the case is conspicuously absent from their findings. Similarly, their studies of how groups of people, including strangers and family groups, organise their movement around the spaces and exhibits show how noticing – paying attention – is often accomplished interactionally. Specific objects, perspectives and ways of behaving in gallery spaces that again, question assumptions about the primacy of individual or ‘individualistic’ spectatorship in the gallery context.
By demonstrating the difference between the production imperatives indicated by the plans and stated intentions of curators, galleries and museums on the one hand, and the observable clues to visitors interactional experiences in museums and galleries on the other, this body of work provides a basis for their ongoing experiments with interactive exhibits and different museological approaches.
Heath et. al’s definition of aesthetics in this case seems motivated by a straight-forward decision to approach anything that happens in museums and galleries as aesthetic. By making this decision, based on initial assumptions and their own familiarity with certain traditions and cultural institutions, they were then able to expand a critical understanding of what cultural institutions are, how people behave in them, and how the context and the exhibits are used as interactional resources.
Aesthetics in Hagberg’s Wittgenstein
I’m doing something similar: I’m looking for a broader notion of aesthetics outside of the contextual frame of the musuem, or at least, not only within this frame. Wittgenstein 2 points out that aesthetics as an area of human concern is both ‘very big’ (in that it is involved in so many areas of life and action), and ‘entirely misunderstood’, by which he means, often limited to the study of a very small subset of things with which aesthetics might be ‘done’ (ie. Art) 3.
This ‘very big’ range of situations will have profoundly different pragmatic implications for a working understanding of aesthetics in each context, which might constitute completely different activities. The only way to find out is to look at each situation, and see it as a different pragmatic context for an understanding of a set of interactional exchanges that can be thought of, in an analytic context, as aesthetics. With this approach in mind, Not having a consistent or even coherent definition of aesthetics as an operational or contextual constant is not a problem. In fact, having to continually re-assess what we might mean by aesthetics by looking at how people negotiate various specific contexts is a major project of this research.
Looking at regularities that emerge from the data drawn from each context will then begin to generate a sense of what is general and what is particular about different interactional contexts and how various notions of aesthetics become relevant to the people involved.
Aesthetics in the context of Conversation Analysis
In the first paper I co-wrote on the subject, we reviewed foundational Conversation Analysis (CA) literature for everyday conversational devices used in accomplishing aesthetic assessments. For that study we sampled data from papers in the CA literature that dealt with ostensibly aesthetic topics such as the evaluation of an artwork. Specifically, the framing of aesthetics in the context of CA emerged from the selection of a conversational sequence from Anita Pomerantz’ paper on agreeing and disagreeing with assessments in which participants negotiate the assessment of one of the participants’ recently purchased artistic prints.
This approach and the use of readily available conversational data helped to ground my observations in the CA literature, while giving me a sense of how the mechanisms and devices of conversation such as turn-taking, preference organisation, and topic-shifting are used in the accomplishment of aesthetic assessments.
In the process of evaluating this print, I observed that the participants made all kinds of things relevant to their assessments including:
authorship,
knowledge of the author,
monetary value,
scarcity,
knowledge about the print,
correct spelling,
how ‘realistic’ it is, and
how much like a magazine advert it is.
So in the context of that conversation, the ways in which these topics are negotiated emerged as what I am thinking of as the practice of conversational aesthetics.
The next step is now to look at various other contextually specific practices of conversational aesthetics, which may well have different characteristics and regularities. The project is then to attend to the different ways in which some of these concepts may or may not be made relevant interactionally, as well as seeing what other kinds of topics and practices become evident.
Building up a vocabulary of conversational aesthetics by looking at the data and working up from there, I can interrogate specific interactional situations to see how they are accomplished and whether they relate to each other, without resorting to a grab-bag of pre-existing high level theoretical constructs.
Aesthetics in the context(s) of the Demographic BNC
The initial CA study has informed how I am approaching a different, if related, set of interactional situations. Looking outside the seemingly evident aesthetic context of Heath et. al’s art gallery or the evaluation of an artwork from Pomerantz’ paper (which could both fit into the narrow ontology of aesthetics that Wittgenstein thought ‘entirely misunderstood’) the purposive sampling of these conversations is geared towards opening up the question of how people do something that can be called aesthetics in their daily lives and interactions.
A lexical approach
Adopting a lexical, rather than a contextual or conceptual selection rationale, I searched for the word ‘beautiful’ in the demographic sections of the British National Corpus (BNC), a searchable archive of over 700 hours of naturalistic conversations, recorded by 124 people wearing tape recorders while going about their daily lives in the early 90s. The recent publication of the Audio BNC has enabled me to find and transcribe the original audio from these conversations, vastly improving on the accuracy of the existing transcriptions, and applying the detailed orthography required for CA-style analysis (I’ve written more about this on this blog).
The word ‘beautiful’ was chosen from a list of keywords picked intuitively as being likely to bring up conversations with a dimension of aesthetic assessment. Searches for domain-specific keywords such as artist names or art-related terms such as ‘artist’, ‘painting’ or ‘sculpture’, had very few hits in the demographic data (33, 153 and 13, respectively). By contrast, these specialist terms were frequently present in transcriptions of TV broadcasts, lectures and formal settings, but hardly at all in more everyday contexts such as having a cup of tea at home, or out shopping. ‘Beautiful’, however, was ubiquitous and plentiful in search results from both formal and informal contexts.
Because of their availability and broad distribution across the corpus, the results from the search for the word ‘beautfiul’ were selected for analysis. To try and focus on the most naturalistic interactions available, all conversations from formal settings such as classrooms, interviews, lectures and TV studios were discarded, leaving just under 200 conversations in 50 different files. Looking through these conversations one by one, conversations in which the word ‘beautiful’ occurred in longer, multi-party sequences rather than short statements or non sequiturs were selected to provide the most interactional data for analysis.
Objections to this approach
Sampling rationale is a significant issue in any Conversation Analytic project, as the sampling of data in CA tends to consist of a range of data, sampled from across a corpus, picked out for the analytic potential to thematise a specific conversational device. Paul Ten Have has said that “many researchers in CA emphasise that transcriptions should not be made with a specific research problem or hypothesis in mind […] The ideal would be to have a large corpus of very detailed transcripts that can be used to locate and analyze specific phenomena.” 4. Although the existing transcripts of the BNC are not sufficiently detailed or accurate to enable CA-device-level phenomena to be picked out, the transcripts make the phenomenon of word selection available for this kind of approach.
It may seem problematic to use a straight-forward lexical search term as a way of selecting data for a CA-informed analysis given that CA as a methodology looks for the “formal and anonymous” apparatus of conversation 5. Firstly, the practice of aesthetics in many contexts might well have nothing to do with the word ‘beautiful’, and even if it did, why not the noun form: ‘beauty’, or some other synonym? Similarly, there is very little hope that a lexical search would be able to distinguish between very different pragmatic uses of the same word (descriptive, bathetic, sarcastic etc.).
However, if Heath et al.’s sampling of what happens interactionally in the “perceptual range of the event” 6 – in their case, the museum or gallery context, can be the basis of what they call a “pragmatic aesthetics” 7, the same might be said of the instance of the word beautiful in everday talk. The lexical aspects of their talk might have a far less obvious impact on their interaction than its temporal and physical context, but as an almost arbitrary placeholder for sampling from an otherwise potentially boundless corpus of naturalistic interactions, it can serve a similar purpose.
Notes:
See, for example, Heath, C. (2004). Configuring Reception: (Dis-)Regarding the “Spectator” in Museums and Galleries. Theory, Culture & Society, 21(6), 43–65., Lehn, D. vom, & Heath, C. (2001). Configuring exhibits. The interactional production of experience in museums and galleries. Verbal Art across Cultures. Aesthetics 44(0), 1–19, or Lehn, D. Vom, Hindmarsh, J., & Luff, P. (2007). Engaging constable: revealing art with new technology. Proceedings of the SIGCHI. ↩
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. University of California Press, 2007. ↩
Hagberg, G. (2008). Wittgenstein’s Aesthetics. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008.). Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein-aesthetics/ ↩
Have, P. Ten. (1990). Methodological Issues in Conversation Analysis. Bulletin de méthodologie sociologique, (1), 1–24. ↩
See Sacks, Harvey. “On the preferences for agreement and contiguity in sequences in conversation.” Talk and social organisation 54 (1987): 69. ↩
Goffman, Erving. Forms of talk. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981. p.3 ↩
vom Lehn, Dirk. “Die Kunst der Kunstbetrachtung: Aspekte einer Pragmatischen Ästhetik in Kunstausstellungen.” Soziale Welt (2006): 83-99. ↩
If all social life is “essentially practical,”Marx’s theory itself must have been an outgrowth of his particular “ensemble of social relationships.” To turn it into a theory about the world seems a mockery. A better use would seem to be to seek to experience its truth in the everyday. Politics are thcn not claimed as something people have;they are actions people do.There are nothings in the sensuous world like “bourgeois consciousness” or “class” or”the capitalist system,” there are only people doing their lives in a succession of here-and-nows. To treat these people as abstract categories illustrates the alienation of the theorist, not the alienation of those the theorist talks about.
The Morality of Ethnomethodology, Hugh Mehan & Houston Wood Theory and Society, Vol. 2, No. 4. (Winter, 1975), pp. 509-530.
