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.
I have been looking for software tools and a sensible workflow for making Conversation Analytic style transcriptions, and I haven’t found any really useful resources that weigh up the pros and cons of different approaches.
The partition format (ex. Praat, ELAN, ANVIL,…) –> based on an infinite timeline
For a CA perspective on talk, the list format is more adequate for the representation of sequentiality; however, for a multimodal analysis of various simultaneous lines of action, the partition format is very useful
These formats have analytical implications
So I began looking at various list-format transcriber options: CLAN, Transana, and Transcriber were the ones I checked out.
Transana didn’t seem to work under Linux at all, so that was a non-starter – even though there were Unix python sources available they looked more or less abandoned to me.
Transcriber was actually in my apt repository! which was a nice surprise. I installed it and got it up and running in minutes. Unfortunately, it looked terrible, used ancient audio devices in Linux, and felt very awkward to use.
I decided to use CLAN for the following reasons:
It’s saves human-readable text files I can munge and edit in vim (or any other text editor)
it uses key-commands for almost everything (little mouse-work necessary)
clean, stable and simple interface and media player integration
It’s highly modular, separating a windowed transcription system from command-line-centric analytical tools
Basically, it has a very unixy-philosophy to it (specialised tools, loosely coupled) and it’s a joy to use.
Here’s my workflow:
Currently I am enhancing some existing transcriptions from the BNC using the original audio from the Audio BNC, which I wrote about in more detail here.
Then I copy and paste this into CLAN’s text editor, which I’m running under WINE – there isn’t a unix version yet. The image above shows a partially complete transcription, along with the audio track below. In order to show just how useful this system is for both transcription and for enhancing existing text transcriptions, I’ve made a short screencast:
Finally, I run the ‘indent’ tool on the resulting .cha file which aligns all the overlap markers and other semi-diagrammatic elements of a CA transcription. For more information on the various utilities included with CLAN, check out the CLAN user manual.
The resulting annotation looks pretty good in CLAN, while being both editable, searchable, and allowing timed viewing and adjusting of the linked media – either using text editing or CLAN’s integrated media browser/editor. The output (a .cex file) can just be copied and pasted into a word/libreoffice document:
Of course before publication, the CA-transcription style will still need to be painstakingly rendered in LaTeX, which is no fun at all. I guess a LaTeX export option is my only feature request for the very impressive CLAN toolset.
The Distributed Library Project enabled people to share their books with their neighbourhood.
The project involved developing a website where people could catalogue, lend and borrow from collections of each other’s books, flyers, zines, videos and other ephemera that may have fallen out of print or had never made it into official circulation.
(WSFII) was a gathering of DIY infrastructure enthusiasts from around the world.WSFII marked the culmination of a series of meetings of Free Wireless Network communities that had sprung up in the wake of the deregulation of the 2.4Ghz citizen wifi spectrum in the 90s. Tinkerers, engineers, artists, community groups and activists had found new ways to use, interpret and deploy technologies on this newly opened bandwidth, and had begun to network internationally. WSFII reinforced the diffusion of this network into a broader ecosystem of complimentary approaches to the self-provision of communication, energy and societal infrastructures. The two-day summit included tracks on Free (as in speech) Money, Open Scientific Data, Free Networks, Free Hardware, Open Licensing, and Creative Commons. One of the most interesting infrastructures created and used at WSFII was ‘The Lime’ community currency. Peter Brownell designed and printed up this event currency especially for WSFII, which was accepted as legal tender in local shops, cafés, pubs and even in the local illicit bar. 10% of whatever was spent in Limes during WSFII was kicked back to the bank, which funded the entire event. WSFII featured the first OKCon (the annual meeting of the Open Knowledge Foundation), and played host to the first BookSprint, Wireless Networking for Development.
Judgements of taste are an intrinsic part of everyday conversational interactions: people make assessments and agree and disagree with them as a core part of how they participate in activities, create and share knowledge, and manage their relationships with one another. However, these conversational assessments can seem resistant to some forms of analysis in ways that are summed up neatly in the Scholastic idiom “there’s no accounting for taste”.
This paper approaches the difficulty of analysing judgements of taste in dialogue by looking at them in terms of the pragmatics of talk-in-interaction. An as-yet-unanalysed example of a conversation about an artwork is drawn from Anita Pomerantz’ seminal Conversation Analytic (CA) paper on conversational assessments, and examined in order to build up a picture of the mechanisms people use when making aesthetic assessments.
This analysis suggests that seemingly high-level aesthetic judgements are accomplished using the same ordinary mechanisms of conversational assessment ubiquitous in everyday talk. Some curious features of topic shifting within assessments are discussed, highlighting some methodological issues for this use of CA, and further research into naturalistic aesthetic assessment is proposed.
Were the loosest and freest conversation to be transcribed, there would immediately be observed something which connected it in all its transitions. Or where this is wanting, the person who broke the thread of discourse might still inform you, that there had secretly revolved in his mind a succession of thought, which had gradually led him from the subject of conversation.
Section III of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume
I found this conversation in Pomerantz’ paper over a year ago, and began to examine the detail of the exchange: how the participants manage thier assessments of the print, and what kinds of conversational devices and mechanisms they use to do so.
I never really thought to find out what they were talking about until I started working on the Audio BNC (my post about that here) and kept hearing lots of mis-transcribed names of artists and musicians in people’s conversations.
I had started searching for Mary Kerrida (sic) and even thought it might be a mistranscription of ‘querida’, and they were looking at some kind of religious print or icon of the Virgin. It just never occured to me, reading their conversation, that they might be talking about a piece by Sister Corita Kent, the peacenick pop-art nun.
When I found this print ‘Life’, I was struck by how little relevance the image seemed to have to the conversation, and how few identifiable descriptions appeared in talk. The only reference that enabled me to identify it (or so I think) was the question from participant E, querying the spelling of the word ‘life’ – a conversational/perceptual repair of sorts.
In fact when analysing this conversation, Pat Healey and I had to accept that there was no real evidence that E’s question was even part of the overall conversation at all.
That’s still the case I guess, and I can’t prove that they’re talking about this image, but this process, of reading a decontextualised transcript of a critique first, then finding the artist, then finally the image being critiqued, has been a useful case in point for a conversational aesthetic approach.
Transforming a neighbourhood kick-about into an epic sporting event through the magic of sports commentary.
Phil Parry (BBC London Sport) and a young commentator in action.
The People Speak‘s first commission from Space Studios in 2005 involved training young football commentators and putting on a spectacular one night tournament on the neighbourhood kick-about. With live-action replays on big screens, live commentary from BBC London Sport’s Phil Parry and sound effects, the Ranwell Estate in Bow was transformed into a glamorous stadium for a night.
One Night Grandstand has since been developed into a travelling stadium kit, which The People Speak offers as a service as a way of augmenting all kinds of local sporting events.
Links & Credits
Fiona Fieber and Tanya Skillen at Space Studios commissioned the first version, and the Chisenhale Gallery who provided space and helped with commentator training.
Phil Parry for helped the project and volunteered his time and support.
Sacha Edwards and the young people of the Ranwell Estate for playing and supporting their teams so enthusiastically.
The subject (Aesthetics) is very big and entirely misunderstood as far as I can see. The use of such a word as ‘beautiful’ is even more apt to be misunderstood if you look at the linguistic form of sentences in which it occurs than most other words.
…
“In everyday life, we often make comments about what might be considered beautiful and or ugly. Such things as simple tools and natural phenomena are objects of such aesthetic judgments: a chair, a tea set, a sunset or a sunflower. Especially in our contact with art, we are quick to state our preferences. Some people enjoy Bach while others prefer The Beatles. There are those who regard Joseph Beuys as a pioneer of modern art, while others do not even consider his “work” as art. Art critics discuss why a certain work of art, a movie or a novel, a theatrical performance or a piece of music, is regarded a failure or a success. In all these aesthetic judgments we try to convince others of what art really is or should be. In this sense, our daily lives are filled with the questions that are central to the philosophy of art, or aesthetics.”
