Eye-tracking Recordings as Data in EMCA Studies

The article contributes to the ongoing discussion of the potential of using eye-tracking recordings in ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA) by exploring to what extent and under what circumstances such recordings may be useful for EMCA studies of multimodal social interaction. For this purpose, it analyzes examples of social conduct recorded by one video camera and one set of eye-tracking glasses. The article concludes that while eye-tracking recordings may, in some specific cases, provide new analytic possibilities for studying social action, they are by no means indispensable for EMCA research in multimodal social interaction, and making use of mobile eye-tracking equipment and recordings may compromise the data as well as the analytic procedure.

Embodied Micro-Transitions

Employing multimodal conversation analysis, this article examines a single episode of interaction taken from a studio session, during which two musicians check a chord progression. It illustrates how intra-activity micro-transitions are solely achieved through embodied actions. The detailed analysis reveals (a) how the suspension of “playing-along” is occasioned to exhibit participants’ orientation to auditory objects whose “turning-on” makes relevant disengagement from other interactional involvements; and (b) how the temporal complexities of multiactivity are contingently managed in exclusive order, explicating (c) members’ embodied practices for working around the organizational constraints of the auditory objects.

Co-animation and the Multimodal Management of Contextualisation Problems when Jointly ‘Doing Being’ Others

In everyday interaction, participants speak on their own behalf but may temporarily speak as or on behalf of a figure (i.e. past or fictional self, others or objects). This practice of ‘animation’ can be continued or extended by co-participants in responsive position, resulting in co-animation (Cantarutti, 2020) of the same figure. Animation relies on the successful ascription of roles, participation framework shifts and projected stances to either the here-and-now of interaction or the there-and-then of animated content. In turn, the recognition of a response as a co-animation requires the creation of similarity between animated contributions. Through a multimodal interactional linguistic analysis of 89 cases of co-animation, this paper discusses how participants jointly solve these interactional contextualisation ‘problems’ smoothly through multimodal gestalts of lexico-grammatical, prosodic and gestural detail.

Achieving mutual accessibility through the coordination of multiple perspectives in open, unstructured landscapes

Whenever actors perceptually engage with the surrounding world in concert with others, they routinely attend to the degree to which their perceptions (whether visual, aural, tactile, etc.) do or do not overlap with their co-participants. In making a perception publicly accessible then, participants must not only attend to potential perceptual gaps, but have-at-hand a range of discursive and embodied practices for closing those and making what is perceived by one mutually accessible to others. In this paper, using data collected from a geological field-school, I investigate the embodied and mobile practices that participants use for coordinating perception via perspective in open, wilderness settings. I focus in particular on the visual practices that participants use for making what one “sees” in the landscape or activity “seeable" for others. These practices are in turn analyzed with regard to how they highlight the camera’s role in documenting the embodied means by which these practices work. In the analysis of data, we will see the participants’ perspective or line of sight, i.e., the axis of their gaze become a more explicit and salient feature for coordinating the interaction. Field geology provides a perspicuous setting for not just investigating how participants reconfigure themselves vis-a-vis local features in the landscape in order to perceive those features, but also for examining the relationship between the videographer’s perspective as documented on camera and that of the participants.

Data collection at height

Coordination, communication and practice in a range of extreme and highly specialised work settings rest upon orientations to sensory resources. For researchers to collect interactional data and to make sense of the embodied conduct of participants in these settings, we therefore argue that particular forms of researcher competence are critical. While the importance of a researcher’s competence in a setting has been widely discussed in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, the types of embodied competence required to study these settings demand further consideration. Here we spotlight ways in which various types of setting-specific participation and embodied competence have informed (i) our data collection strategies and (ii) our abilities to make sense of the recorded data in a study of rope access work, otherwise known as industrial climbing.

The local and filmed accountability of sensorial practices

This paper contributes to a multimodal EMCA approach to sensoriality and to a reflection about how video can support it. First, it discusses how the intersubjectivity and accountability of sensorial practices are locally and endogenously achieved by and for the participants. This accountability is implemented through various multimodal resources, which make sensorial practices accessible for the co-participants. Second, it shows how the visual, verbal and sometimes co-tactile orientations of the participants are also the very basis on which researchers and other professionals build the videographability of the activity. The paper articulates these two aspects by studying activities dealing with food, in which the participants engage in touching food as a relevant sensorial practice within their ongoing course of action.

Capturing the nurse’s kinesthetic experience of wearing an exoskeleton

In this study, we introduce a video-ethnographic study of a research process in which nursing students try on exoskeletons—wearable forms of technology that are meant to decrease lower back strain when lifting something. We adopt microanalysis of video-recorded interaction to analyze moments in which a nurse tests how her body feels with the exoskeleton. Moreover, we explore how the nurse simultaneously makes accountable—observable and reportable (Garfinkel, 1967, p. vii)—to others how her body feels “inside,” i.e. her experience of kinaesthesia, or the ability of the human body to perceive its own movements and states as a ”body-in-motion” (Sheets-Johnstone, 2002, p. 138). We reflect on how the fact that we video recorded the whole process of testing the exoskeleton with three cameras and complemented our video analysis with observations and post-questionnaires enabled us to capture some of the kinesthetic, interactive, and context-specific aspects of trying on the exoskeleton.

Capturing love at a distance

Studies have shown that multisensorial interactions are an important medium for achieving love and intimacy. Nevertheless, the question remains: How do people constitute their “love at a distance” when they can only interact with each other over a video call, in which certain sensorial resources (e.g., touch, smell, and taste) are not available? Drawing from two years of video-based fieldwork involving recordings of habitual calls among the members of migrant families, I consider the application of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA)-informed video analysis to investigating intimate relationships constructed through remote means. I present an innovative method of video recording that allows me to analyze the interactional resources toward which participants orient themselves in their calls. I illustrate this approach with data analysis to demonstrate the relevance of video to examining intimacy at a distance. This article proposes that a distinct contribution of video-based research to the discipline lies in its ability to capture how people use their embodied and sensorial interactions to form intimacy across distances.

Co-sensoriality, con-sensoriality, and common-sensoriality

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“More than meets the eye”

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