Reading for and writing a review article is a historically-situated and contingent activity, just as discourse analysis and conversation analysis. Furthermore, reading a book on CA or DA, for example, may encourage the reader to begin a trajectory of his/her own CA or DA trajectory. Although I had done work drawing on CA, reading Doing Conversation Analysis made CA salient to me at the time that I was beginning to think about a presentation for the conference International Conference on Communication, Problem Solving, and Learning. Although we will never know what my analysis would have looked like had I not agreed to do a review article, and therefore not read DCA, I would have done a different analysis. [1]

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Data

Figure 1: Initial notes for an analysis of laboratory talk, recorded on videotape, over and about graphs in a professional, university-based scientific laboratory. [2]

Analysis

A discourse analyst would begin by structuring the "text," which consists of words, spatially arranged rather than starting at the beginning of each line, and a drawing. The quotation marks around the two sentences on lines 2 ('What is there to be seen?') and line 3 ('Is this a case to be retained?') may indicate something that had been said. Following the graph, one may assume that there is a relation between text and graph, an intertextual relation. The questions may actually pertain to the graph, thereby revealing some of the fundamental questions that scientists are have to resolve—though they may not frame their activity in these same terms. The two lines are bracketed, followed by the statement "collectively achieved in interaction." These initial statements are followed by an arrow preceding some text "structure of this work by means of which ..." Here, the use of "this work" refers the sentence to something else, making the use of the indexical "this" plausible. The one activity indicated earlier pertains to collective achievement, perhaps of the answers to the rhetorical questions posed earlier? Two references to ethnomethodological or CA-type studies (GOODWIN 1995 'Seeing in depth' and AMANN & KNORR-CETINA, 1990) complete the display. [3]

References

Amann, Klaus, & Knorr-Cetina, Karin D. (1990). The fixation of (visual) evidence. In Michael Lynch & Steve Woolgar (Eds.), Representation in scientific practice (pp.85-121). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Goodwin, Charles (1995). Seeing in depth. Social Studies of Science, 25, 237-274.

Citation

Please cite this article as follows (and include paragraph numbers if necessary):

Roth, Wolff-Michael (2001, May). The Politics and Rhetoric of Conversation and Discourse Analysis. Review Essay, Supplement V: Research and Writing as Contingent Activity [3 paragraphs]. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research [On-line Journal], 2(2). Available at: http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/2-01/roth/2-01review-roth-dcaex.htm [Date of Access: Month Day, Year].