scholarly journals Semiotic resources for navigation: A video ethnographic study of blind people’s uses of the white cane and a guide dog for navigating in urban areas

Semiotica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (222) ◽  
pp. 287-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Due ◽  
Simon Lange
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Interaction Analysis ◽  
Multimodal Interaction ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Blind People ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Semiotic Resources ◽  
White Cane ◽  
Large Corpus

AbstractThis paper describes two typical semiotic resources blind people use when navigating in urban areas. Everyone makes use of a variety of interpretive semiotic resources and senses when navigating. For sighted individuals, this especially involves sight. Blind people, however, must rely on everything else than sight, thereby substituting sight with other modalities and distributing the navigational work to other semiotic resources. Based on a large corpus of fieldwork among blind people in Denmark, undertaking observations, interviews, and video recordings of their naturally occurring practices of walking and navigating, this paper shows how two prototypical types of semiotic resources function as helpful cognitive extensions: the guide dog and the white cane. This paper takes its theoretical and methodological perspective from EMCA multimodal interaction analysis.

scholarly journals Helping as a Concurrent Activity: How Students Engage in Small Groups While Pursuing Classroom Tasks

2022 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise Wakke ◽  
Vivien Heller
Keyword(s):  
Learning Outcomes ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Interaction Analysis ◽  
Multimodal Interaction ◽  
Problem Definition ◽  
Fifth Grade ◽  
Classroom Activities ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Shared Space

This study examines interactions in which students help each other with their learning during classroom instruction, forming groups in the process. From a conversation analytic perspective, helping is assumed to be a sequentially organized activity jointly accomplished by the participants. As an activity that proceeds alongside other ongoing classroom activities, helping can be conceived as part of a multiactivity that poses students with multi-faceted interactional and moral challenges. While previous research on helping in educational contexts has primarily focused on the influence of helping on learning outcomes and social dynamics in helping interactions, the present study investigates how students cope with the intricacies of moral commitments inherent in helping as a concurrent activity. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, we aim to elaborate on how students’ dual involvements – i.e., their involvement in classroom activities while simultaneously providing help – manifest in the ways in which groups are constituted, maintained, and dissolved. The analyses reveal that both the compatibility of helping with the activity already in progress as well as the students’ problem definition are consequential for the sequential and bodily-spatial unfolding of the help interaction, inducing different arrangements that constitute a continuum, at each end of which there is a dominant orientation toward the shared space of helping or toward the individual/collective space. Furthermore, from a methodological perspective, our study aims to demonstrate the extent to which multimodal interaction analysis is applicable when examining naturally occurring groups, in this case, in interactive processes of helping. The study is based on a data corpus that comprises video recordings of mathematics and German lessons from two fifth-grade classrooms.

scholarly journals Combining Multimodal Techniques to Approach the Study of Academic Lectures: A Methodological Reflection

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 178-198
Author(s):  
Edgar Bernad-Mechó ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Interaction Analysis ◽  
Multimodal Interaction ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Multimodal Discourse ◽  
The Social ◽  
Semiotic Resources ◽  
Academic Settings ◽  
Academic Lectures ◽  
Methodological Reflection

This article offers a methodological reflection on the use of multimodal techniques for the study of academic lectures. Three distinct multimodal approaches have been put forward to explore the use of language holistically, namely, multimodal social semiotics (MSS), multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) and multimodal interaction analysis (MIA). These approaches differ in their main focus—the social context, the system of semiotic resources available to the speakers and the social actors, respectively—and the tools they provide to conduct multimodal analyses. To exemplify how analyses may be conducted within each of the paradigms in the context of academic lectures in English, I examine an excerpt extracted from an African-American history lecture from Yale University by a native English speaker in which he organizes his discourse in between content sections. Through the use of short multimodal transcriptions, I discuss how MSS can be used for reflections on the social contexts of academic lectures, MDA describes the use of semiotic resources employed by the lecturers, and MIA can be used to look into how lecturers structure their speech into sequences of actions. Ultimately, I suggest a combination of multimodal methodologies to obtain a broader account of the intricacies of discourse in academic settings.

Synchronization in demonstrations. Multimodal practices for instructing body knowledge

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (s4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Ehmer
Keyword(s):  
Functional Properties ◽  
Interaction Analysis ◽  
Multimodal Interaction ◽  
Argentine Tango ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Central Resource ◽  
Large Corpus ◽  
Do So ◽  
Body Knowledge

Abstract Demonstrations are a central resource for instructing body knowledge. They allow instructors to provide learners with a structured perceptual access to the performance of an activity. The present paper considers demonstrations as inherently social activities, in which not only the instructor but also the learners may participate. A particular form of co-participation is that learners synchronize their own bodily actions with the demonstration of the instructor. The paper examines two practices of synchronization in demonstrations. In emergent synchronizations the instructor invites the student(s) to synchronize, rather than request them to do so. In orchestrated synchronizations teachers actively pursue the students’ bodily synchronization. The two practices are typically used for different instructional purposes. While emergent synchronizations are typically used in corrective instructions, orchestrated synchronizations are typically used to instruct new knowledge. Based on a large corpus of instructions in dancing Argentine Tango, the paper uses multimodal interaction analysis to characterize both practices regarding their interactional organization, their functional properties and the resources used by the participants to establish synchronization.

Unmet wishes: A multimodal interaction analysis of the rejection of choice in assisted shopping interactions

2021 ◽  
pp. 5-29
Keyword(s):  
Free Choice ◽  
Interaction Analysis ◽  
Multimodal Interaction ◽  
Good Care ◽  
Loss Of Face ◽  
Multimodal Analysis ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Sequential Unfolding ◽  
Communication Impairments

In the field of health communication, it is increasingly important to understand the interactional management of free choice and the demands of (good) care, especially in situations where these two objectives conflict with each other. In a multimodal interaction analysis of video recordings, this article examines decision-making processes in which a caretaker refuses to retrieve a requested object for a woman living with acquired brain injury during their weekly shopping trip. The multimodal analysis describes both the sequential unfolding of these assisted shopping interactions and the interplay of multimodal resources used by the participants. The analysis demonstrates how choice is made available, despite communication impairments, and how the participants deal with the potential loss of face resulting from the caretaker’s rejections.

scholarly journals Rules at Play: Correcting Projectable Violations of Who Plays Next

Human Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Svensson ◽  
Burak S. Tekin
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Empirical Analysis ◽  
Practical Problem ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
The Social ◽  
Turn Taking ◽  
Interactional Perspective ◽  
The Empirical Analysis

AbstractThis study examines the situated use of rules and the social practices people deploy to correct projectable rule violations in pétanque playing activities. Drawing on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, and using naturally occurring video recordings, this article investigates socially organized occasions of rule use, and more particularly how rules for turn-taking at play are reflexively established in and through interaction. The alternation of players in pétanque is dependent on and consequential for the progressivity of the game and it is a practical problem for the players when a participant projects to break a rule of “who plays next”. The empirical analysis shows that formulating rules is a practice for indicating and correcting incipient violations of who plays next, which retrospectively invoke and establish the situated expectations that constitute the game as that particular game. Focusing on the anticipative corrections of projectable violations of turn-taking rules, this study revisits the concept of rules, as they are played into being, from a social and interactional perspective. We argue and demonstrate that rules are not prescriptions of game conduct, but resources that reflexively render the players’ conducts intelligible as playing the game they are engaging in.

scholarly journals Multifunctional Interactive Furniture for Smart Cities

Proceedings ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (19) ◽  
pp. 1212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oihane Gómez-Carmona ◽  
Diego Casado-Mansilla ◽  
Diego López-de-Ipiña
Keyword(s):  
Information Exchange ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Sustainable Use ◽  
Multimodal Interaction ◽  
Central Element ◽  
Management Tool ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Right

The adaptation of cities to a future in which connectivity is at the service of the citizens will be a reality by creating interaction spaces and augmented urban areas. The research on this field falls within the scope of Smart Cities (SC) with the advantages that the common public spaces provide as new points for information exchange between the city, the urban furniture and their citizens. Kiosk systems have been recognized as an appropriate mean for providing event-aware and localized information to the right audience at the right time. Hence, in this article, we provide a vision of an eco-system of multifunctional urban furniture, where kiosks are part of them, designed not only for digital interaction but for sustainable use and symbolic integration into the urban environment as well. The proposed approach is conceived to drive services through digital urban nodes that facilitate tailored citizen-city communication and interaction. The central element of the designed platform consists on an intelligent digital kiosk which features a series of hardware and software components for sensing different environmental conditions, multimodal interaction with users and for conveying the captured data to the Cloud. The custom-based contents visualized to the users are controlled remotely through a management tool that allows to set-up and configure the digital kiosk. This system is not presented as an ad-hoc solution for one specific purpose but instead, it becomes a platform that can accommodate and solve the needs of every kind of user that populates urban shared-use spaces.

scholarly journals Enacting sabotage in siblings’ conflicts: Desired objects and deceptive bodies

Childhood ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 090756822096566
Author(s):  
Emilia Zotevska ◽  
Asta Cekaite ◽  
Ann-Carita Evaldsson
Keyword(s):  
Interaction Analysis ◽  
Multimodal Interaction ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Sibling Conflict ◽  
Considerable Time ◽  
Specific Focus ◽  
Time And Energy

The present study examines sibling’ conflict trajectories with a specific focus on acts of sabotage – deliberate obstruction or destruction of activities with an object. Multimodal interaction analysis is used to understand how siblings’ conflicts are organised through multiple (verbal and embodied) practices. We further draw on childhood studies that focuses on children’s material practices and use the term enactment to better understand human-nonhuman relations. The study found that children put considerable time and energy into configuring deceptive bodies that both organised and disrupted their local moral orders.

scholarly journals Misunderstanding as a resource in interaction

Pragmatics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica S. Robles
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Multimodal Discourse Analysis ◽  
Multimodal Discourse ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
Activity Assessment ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
A Site ◽  
A Current

The phenomenon of misunderstanding is a recurrent feature of everyday life – sometimes a source of frustration, sometimes a site of blame. But misunderstandings can also be seen as getting interactants out of (as well as into) trouble. For example, misunderstandings may be produced to deal with disaffiliative implications of ‘not being on the same page,’ and as such they may be deployed as a resource for avoiding trouble. This paper examines misunderstanding as a pragmatic accomplishment, focusing on the uses to which it is put in interactions as a practice for dealing with threats to intersubjectivity: the extent to which persons are aligned in terms of a current referent, activity, assessment, etc. A multimodal discourse analysis of audio and video recordings of naturally-occurring talk inspects moments in which misunderstandings are purported or displayed (rather than overtly invoked) as well as how such misunderstandings are oriented to as simply-repairable references, versus inferential matters more misaligned and potentially fraught. Rather than being a straightforward reflection of an experience of trouble with understanding, misunderstanding may also be collaboratively produced to manage practical challenges to intersubjectivity.

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