COMM620 Summer11/Class notes

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Discourse Analysis

• Goodnight
• Summer 2011

Contents 1 Books 2 July 5 : Introduction: The Methods of Discourse Analysis 2.1 Key terms and topics 2.2 Roots in Rhetoric 2.2.1 Sophists 2.2.2 Plato's take 2.2.3 Aristotle's "third way" 2.2.4 Isocrates 2.3 Jump offs 2.4 Homework 3 July 6, Semiotics: Signs, Things & Structures 3.1 Two schools of semiotics, complementary but different 3.2 Saussure: sign, sign system 3.3 Peirce, Pragmatism 3.4 Modal Semiotic Analysis 3.5 Wordle experiments 4 July 7, more on Semiotics 4.1 Wordles 4.2 Canons 4.3 "Texts"? 4.4 Analyzing Structure 4.5 Kinds of structuring 4.5.1 I. Marked and Unmarked terms 4.5.2 II. Logical structures, 4.5.3 III. Positioning 4.5.4 IV. Archetypal 4.6 Exercise: Gettysburg Address 4.7 Jump offs 5 July 11 5.1 Finishing up Semiotics 5.1.1 Genealogical Analysis 5.1.2 Discourse Formation 5.1.2.1 Synchronic 5.1.2.2 Diachronic 5.1.3 Code: world, medium, reflexivity 5.1.4 Codes 5.1.5 To be a semiotician ... 5.1.6 Thematizing code 5.1.7 Semiotic analysis 5.1.8 Reflecting on semiotics 5.2 Symbolic Interaction 5.2.1 Symbols and Communication 5.2.2 Social order 5.2.3 Structures of social action 5.2.4 Social institutions 5.2.5 Audiences addressed 5.2.5.1 They 5.2.5.2 We 5.2.5.3 You 5.2.5.4 I, Me 5.2.5.5 It 5.3 TODO 5.4 Jump offs 6 July 12 6.1 Reviewing symbolic interaction of yesterday ... 6.2 Social Drama 6.3 What is a "significant symbol"? 6.3.1 Reflection 6.3.2 Fusion 6.3.3 Surplus 6.4 Symbols in action 6.5 4 types of games 6.5.1 Agonistics 6.5.2 Alea 6.5.3 Mimicry 6.5.4 Ilinx 6.6 Symbolic interaction in Communication / Media 6.7 Our significant symbols 6.7.1 Comcast sleepers 6.8 TODO 7 July 13 7.1 What is a significant symbol? 7.2 More examples of significant symbols 7.3 Symbolic interaction in internet 7.4 Guilt-redemption cycle 7.4.1 Crisis frame: Judgement 7.4.2 Epochal frame: The Moment 7.4.3 Tragic frame: Acceptance 7.4.4 Grotesque frame: Rejection 7.4.5 Comic Frame: Symbols, Figure 7.4.6 Other frames? 7.5 Pragmatics 7.5.1 Historical context 7.6 TODO 7.7 Jump offs 8 July 14 8.1 Assembling terms for Google Trends 8.2 Pragmatics overview (David J. Parnell) 8.3 William James 8.4 George Herbert Mead 8.5 And more... 8.6 Structural-functional pragmatics: The communicative uses of terms 8.7 Pragmatics = Context 8.8 Deixis 8.9 Decorum = Propriety = Bienséance 8.10 Speech Acts 8.11 Reference as speec activity 8.12 Figuring the reference 8.13 Presupposition and Entailment 8.14 One is able to infer ... 8.15 Cooperation and implicature 8.16 The failure of cooperation 8.17 Benson & Hedges 8.18 Conversational implicature 8.19 Felicity conditions 8.20 Speech acts: Direct & Indirect 8.21 Speech events 8.22 Pledge 8.23 Tip of the hat, wag of the finger, anger and mildness formalized 8.24 The risks of face may lead to the break off of communication 8.25 Jump offs 9 July 18 9.1 Back to pragmatics 9.2 Partisanship 9.3 Pragma- Dialectical Rules 9.4 Conversational analysis 9.4.1 Self and society 9.4.2 Conversation analysis 9.4.3 Sacks, suicide prevention 9.4.4 Conversational pairs 9.4.5 Summons-Answer Sequence 9.4.5.1 Some shared pairs 9.4.6 1. Recognition: A necessary pair 9.5 = 2. Signaling turns: An organizing pair 9.5.1 3. Complement: an ambivalent pair 9.5.1.1 Flattery 9.5.2 Adjacency Pairs 9.5.3 Exended conversation 9.5.4 Story telling 9.5.5 Conversation and media 9.5.6 What kinds of questions can be asked here? 9.6 Jump offs 10 July 19 Content analysis 10.1 Content analysis 10.2 Media content 10.3 Audience content 10.4 Participatory culture 10.5 Six steps of CA 10.5.1 1. Why do an analysis? 10.5.2 2. Sample a corpus 10.5.3 3. Units of content 10.5.4 4. Preparing for coding 10.5.5 5. Coding content 10.5.6 6. 10.6 GTG's practical suggestions for qualitative CA 10.7 LPS - "job killer" 10.8 Jump offs

Books

Myers, Discourse of blogs and wikis

• http://library.usc.edu/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/0/0/5?searchdata1=3432458{CKEY}

Wodak & Meyer, Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis

• http://library.usc.edu/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/0/0/5?searchdata1=2378291{CKEY}

July 5 : Introduction: The Methods of Discourse Analysis

Discovery, invention, and use of...

• Multi-modal discourse analysis of objects on the internet

Double-sided:

• Working through theories of discourse
• Playful work toward a research project

Key terms and topics

• Semiotics
• Symbolic Interaction
• Content Analysis/ Framing
• Pragmatics
• Conversational Analysis/ Ethnography
• Social Theory
• Multi-modal Discourse

We'll talk about all of them but papers might work through just one perspective

Roots in Rhetoric

Sophists

• Immigrants came to Greece
• Heard language in courts and determined strategies to succeed
• Relativistic use of language

Dissoi-Logoi: all arguments are double-sided

Persuasion

• Words create a fiction or illusion
• Rights words in the right moment can overcome doubt, opposition; enable people to act

Language is available for anyone to use

• Not inherited
• Cleverness and wit
• Performance
• No meaning outside the consensus it creates

Why might this view of language be "wrong"?

• See Plato's take...

Plato's take

From doxa to episteme

Dualistic view of language

Dialogue

• Language is cooperative rather than contestatory
• Open to discussants rather than closed to contestants
• Audience doesn't determine winning
  • Judgement is shared among participants

Words are a way from

• common everyday opinion (doxa)
• through dialectic
• toward a disciplining of the mind, sharpening

Words and language are vehicles for training the mind

• Starting place

Moving from particular to archetypical forms

• Trying to get to something that transcends
• Searching for myths, archetypes of human meaning

Such conversation is private, not staged/performed

• Spontaneous

Two views of language

• Idealist: experts (clergy, teaching) encourage personal growth, dialogue
• ...?

Aristotle's "third way"

Any individual entity will fulfill its purpose

• Acorn will grow into an oak tree

Language is a techne or technology

• Makes things (opinions, belief)
• Will make them well if used properly

Words should be patterned, fit so that they contribute to the proper motivations of people in being successful

"Hooks" in the use of words

• Character, Believability, Reputation
• Emotion, passion.
  • If things are too hot, try to cool them; too cool, heat them up!
• Fit language into a reasonable story
  • People can recognize themselves, their capacity for action and restraint
  • Language creates a public

Capacity of action is matched by the seriousness and weight of what they have before them

Civic literacy is part of Aristotle's active view of language

Aristotle also tried to classify language

• Not about transcendence, aspiration, myth (Plato)
• But a reference system for classifying elements of the natural world
  • Comprehensive, complete

Isocrates

Rhetoric is a national construction

• Growth of texts that everyone reads, language that everyone speaks
• Each generation sets upon the task of appropriating, making new
  • Mediums of communication change
  • Isocrates observed the emergence of writing as a new medium

Jump offs

Ethnographers working with discourse

• Paul Lichterman
• Nina Eliasoff, playgrounds

American Rhetoric

• Discourse to dump into Wordle

Homework

• http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/3829107/John_Kerry%27s_letter_regarding_Net_Neutrality
• Kerry, John. (2011). "Net Neutrality Needs Your Help Today". Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-kerry/net-neutrality-needs-your_b_536890.html

July 6, Semiotics: Signs, Things & Structures

Semiotics is historical as well as formal

• How do meanings change over time?

Two schools of semiotics, complementary but different

Saussure: "French structuralism": end is to determine order

• How do terms order thoughts?
• How do thoughts order terms?
• Human knowledge produced through signs (signifiers/signified:terms/concepts)
• Dualist: Relate "signals" and "ideas"

Peirce: "pragmatists", American, U of Chicago

• Trinitarian: Language (signifiers) and thought (concept) plus object (referent)
• Process of social change as it is generated, constructed, and then taken down by language
• Consistent with Bahktin
• More interested in context

Saussure/structuralists : order :: Peirce/pragmatists : social-collaboration

Saussure: sign, sign system

Sign:

• Signified: concepts built up through generalisation
• Signifier: word, symbol, image
• Signs are created and linked to each other

Note: no "referent" here to an "outside world"

Signifier is a product of conventional interpretation

• Use signs to call attention to concepts

Signs are arbitrary

• Concepts are linked to words via convention
• Different words can be used for a concept as long as they are conventional

Speech is the original way of making meaning through sounds

Sign systems constructed by...

• Difference
• Position, where it fits within a hierarchy or structure of possible moves
• Value, what can it do when evoked under different conditions

Canonical example of a semiotic/sign system:

• Game of chess
• Set of pieces
  • Each piece is known by what is is not (difference)
  • Value determined by how it can move
  • Any particular moment of play is understood through position

Semiotic systems depend on access

• We are "inside" a chess game by virtue of knowing the rules
• But "outside" glyphs in AZ, outside the culture of producing the semiotic system

Semiotic systems may be habitual-conventional but naturalized

• Speaking
• Writing
• Religious worship
• Social etiquette
• Historical tradition

Or ... contingent-constructed

• Flag-semaphore
• Morse code
• Traffic
• Safety

Design of sign systems:

• They should be arbitrary and equivalent across language
• System goal is toward completeness, signs to cover all possible cases
• Need not be closed, can be open and self-generating

Examples of signs in communication:

• Social order: e.g. a line or queue, wait in line in order to preserve a social system, sense of fairness
• Social threshold, define core/periphery, inside/outside

Reasonable people recognize that different cultures have different systems: threshold, order

Peirce, Pragmatism

Key term: act

Sign is a triangular system

• Representamen, ("sign vehicle") the medium
• Interpretant, ("sense") the sense brought to the relation of word + thing
• Object, ("referent") the thing referred to by the representamen

Contextualism

• Arbitrariness isn't entirely arbitrary
• It is historical
• Each repetition contributes to change overtime

Communication is always complex!

• All about action
• How we act and act on the communication taking place

Semiosis is a moment of

• Order, clarity, or...
• Action
  • "Do what is appropriate for us/me/them"

Pragmatics involves agency

Three kinds of signs:

• Symbolic, e.g. actual word "CLOSED" painted on a sign
  • Arbitrary, conventional
• Iconic, e.g. sign cut into shape of a lock
  • Mimics or immitates
• Indexical, e.g. sign obstructing passage through a gate
  • "Doing and communicating at the same time"

Communication always broadcasts on multiple wavelengths

Language does not stabilize easily

• It is a creative process
• We foreground because we think it creates a certain kind of meaning

Icons can last and travel across times + spaces

• e.g. Rosie the Riveter use in original context and re-appropriation to contemporary situations

Modal Semiotic Analysis

Modes not Types

• Signs can be said to represent the world
• The mode of that representation is a site of the construction of the world
• There are idealist and realistic versions of pragmatic semiotics
  • Is it a subjectively constructed?
  • Or real outcome of material processes?

Three modes:

• Actual
• Possible
• Necessity, rules, discipline, expertise, highly formal

Wordle experiments

• Tools for playing and intervening into sign systems and texts

July 7, more on Semiotics

Semiotics makes communication central

• Many people study communication without studying language

Work of semiotics is mainly to uncover "hidden codes"

Tasks for today:

• Finish Wordles

Wordles

GNU Manifesto

• Using synonyms to create many hooks in (copia)
  • tax, cost, reward, donation, support, property, agreement, good
• Avoiding synonyms in other cases to create a strong center
  • GNU GNU GNU GNU programmers, programmers, programmers

"Manifesto"

• Frames the argument
• Is manifesto a genre?

Clustering terms

• Once freed from grammatical structure
• Observing "tokens" of a "type"

Structure is conventional

Canons

Elements of building a text (any text)

Five elements (discovered in the Wordle project):

Invention, discovery, subject, agent, audience

• Why these words?
• Why was this written?
• What was the purpose?
• How was the particular text invented?

Arrangement, design, proportion, movement from one part to the next

• Does it participate in a genre? Form of orienting a message to achieve communication?
• Arrangement + proportion: What are the parts? How do they each work together?
  • Beginning, Middle, End
• What models are copied? How do they work?

Style, color, tone, technique

• Attention (diverted as well as attracted)

Memory, mediation

• Media have certain conventions, procedures
• Should account for the kinds of mediation that go into memory
• Memory is a constructive act
  • Range of why, how people remember
• How is the text preserved?
  • What are the conditions for its re-entry?

Act, what does the discourse or text do?

• How does it announce its duty?
• How does it adopt modalities? (Actuality, necessity, possibility)
• How does it differentiate its act from others that may be similar?
• What is being done or going on using this medium or linguistic code?

"Texts"?

Text is an ambiguous term

• Metaphorically, "society" might be a text "that we are all writing out"

Genres become stabilized when media is reliable

• Texts in our society are closely linked through media
• e.g. for 50 years, Communication studied mass media
• Instability means that skills, habits, models, etc. are not necessarily going to remain useful

Analyzing Structure

(Challenging, confusing section...)

Syntagmatic - structure of form

• Looking at syntax
• Who said what to whom when?
• What is now? Where is here?

Paradigmatic - structure of content

Kinds of structuring

I. Marked and Unmarked terms

Unmarked term

• Preferred term
• Unremarkable, typical

Marked term

• dis-preferred
• paired, altered
• Stigmatized, subordinate
• e.g. the marked term in a Tide commercial is "stain"

Look for terms that are unnoticed and which are called to attention

• Why are the unnoticed not drawing attention? Naturalized?
• Why are the marked terms problematic? Or requiring work?
• Unmarked terms have power
• Marked terms have lesser power
• Unmarked terms work on the marked terms to gain approval (may be ritually)

Look for pairs of preferred/dis-preferred

• Contradictories: either/or, in/out, virtue/vice, legals/illegals
• Contraries: many/few, good/bad
  • Opposites, some are good, some are bad but not straight contradiction
• Qualified modally: are/aren't
• Pairs are reversible, unreal can become real
  • Unreal and fictional have explanatory power
• Terms reverse themselves ("that's nasty!", "sick!!!")

II. Logical structures,

Square of opposition

• Originally devised by Aristotle
• Groundwork for "common sense"
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_of_opposition

Law of identity:

A is A

Law of Contraction:

A is not non-A

III. Positioning

Space (note which is marked, if any)

• Above/ below
• In front/ behind
• Close/ distant
• Left/ right
• North/ South/East/West
• Inside/ Outside
• Center/ margin
• Conduit/ dwelling

Sometimes there are pairs but one of the pairs is invisible

• Made invisible
• Or naturalized
• Even though it may be operating very powerfully

Time

• Before & after
• Beginning & end
• Repeated Novel
• Urgent & Relaxed
• Continuous & Broken
• Linear & Cyclical
• Closed & Open
• Moment & Abiding

Time can be reversed as well

• "We've come to the end. Let's begin again..."

IV. Archetypal

Where the archetypes reside is contested. Can be...

• The mind that works to discover truth through conversation, dialogue, practice, contest, ...
• Or stories with similar forms embedded in folktales

Attention to folktales comes late in modernity

• But major discovery
• Science, scientific method was a triumph over superstition and folk knowledge

Recovery of folk knowledge as embedded in semiosis meant that you could find a structure of understanding in the particulars of tale that accounted for its durability and richness

• By looking at that form, you could tie the particulars to a particular moment in time, place, society
• e.g. Jack & the Beanstalk is a mythic tale about a working class folk hero

Levi-Strauss said myths are "reducible to a small number of similar types if we abstract from among the diversity of characters a few elementary functions." (DC 116-117)

Folk tales were only written down in the 19th c. but were likely in circulation long before that

In the semiotic analysis of a folk tale...

• Post-structuralists go to psychoanalysis (esp. Lacan)

GTG reads Jack & the Beanstalk as a tale about innovation, capitalism and entrepreneurship

• Anti-capitalist? Anti-monopolist? Shumpeter: Destruction/invention

Social justice only later added with the detail that the giant stole from Jack's father

Intuiting forms, not typical of social science

• Read through the structures
• Looking for transcendent forms that will be recognizable to others
  • Comparable to other stories

Rather than hermeneutics

• You're not looking for a cultural form with long standing
• But a story with conventions that fits certain kinds of power relations

Exercise: Gettysburg Address

Identifying some pairs:

• We/they
• Living/dead
• Cannot/can
  • Unusual reversal: the living cannot; the dead can -- something to think about

Conventional temporal structure:

• Past
  • "Four score and seven years ago..."
• Present
  • "Now"
• Future
  • Emphasis on future; future tense

Three paragraphs roughly mapped to the three tenses

• Past is smallest, future is longest
• 1-3-5 layout
  • 1 sentence
  • 3 sentences
  • 5 sentences

Compare to the end of the Battle of Marathon

• Young people compare about the "old men of Marathon"

Speculating on the durability of this speech

• "We" left space for others to mourn

"Dedication" (appears 6 times)

• How does it work in a funerary address?
• Multiple meanings
  • A nation "dedicated" to...
• Dedication implies lasting temporality
  • By choosing to be dedicated, one joins into a meaningful time
• Each temporal context changes the meaning of "dedication"
• For the audience, giving greater meaning to the moment of finality accompanying the brutal deaths of a bloody battle
• Associated with: "hallow", "consecrate", "honor"

Very brief speech

• Brevity makes its own statement
• Lincoln was preceded by a 1 hr speech
• This was more like a "promise" than a typical oration of the time

Jump offs

Hoping to use this for diss work?

• Independent study of just one method or theory of language
• Use this in a quals question

DELICIOUS THIS=== TODO The Conscience of a Hacker - The Mentor

• http://www.textfiles.com/phreak/manifest.phk

July 11

Goal: Be able to answer this question:

• What is the difference between semiotics and symbolic action?

Friday: time available to meet GTG and talk about summer projects

Finishing up Semiotics

Genealogical Analysis

Genealogy: method most associated with semiotics

• Associated with Foucault's Archaeological of Knowledge
• Replacing the "History of Ideas"

Archaeological view understands that there is nothing but past

• Not interested in re-entering the past but re-constructing it
• You (analyst) can't understand the structures, languages, or relationships of the past on their own terms
  • Re-constructed work does not take language for granted

Discourse analysis is not about a history of ideas

But how discourses competed and cooperated together

• Trajectories of institutional codes
• We've seen the codes come from a variety of sources

Certain combinations of codes work together to create a very powerful institutions

Example: prison and shifting codes

• Prison is punishment
• Prison is part of an economic system in which crime incurs systemic cost
• Prison is a location for psychological rehabilitation

Rather than see a single, linear history

• We see see shifting sets of power relations

The genealogical method is about identifying moments of transition in codes

• Part of the analysis is to identify any on-going construction, underlying power relationship that persists over time (hegemony)

Look for legitimation claim

• They may expose juncture between old/new power relationships
• "Pivots"
• May be represented in the language of a single thinker/articulator
  • Other times it is evident in a new institutional practice (architecture, placement of prisons)
• Grossberg: "spaces of conjunction", this is justified by that
  • Two elements joined, replicated, legitimation away from something and toward something else

Conjunction may point toward the bounds of reason

• What is reaonable? What is un-reasonable?
• e.g. Quakers believe public flogging unreasonable and forced isolation an opportunity for reflection

How are procedures and standards legitimated?

• e.g. Hospital birth meets certain standards (cleanliness, epidural) unavailable (or unreliable) in home births

How is the rational distinguished?

• Rationality is established through institutional logics
• Code here is often taken for granted, semiotician needs to identify and interpret them

What deserves a hearing? And where?

• Where is work done?
• Which matters are public and which are private?

What defines identity?

• Identity is your fit within the overall code

Discourse Formation

Social practices coded by language

• Relationships among terms
• Rupture and change over time

It is possible to to both...

Synchronic

Stuff that happens in the same

What are the relationships among terms over space?

Answering all of the questions about down to a macro level

• Sometimes working on an "extensive present"

Examples:

• Language of accountability
• Language of property

Analyzing an "architecture of terms"

• Observing a variety of codes as they are located in junctures

Reading all the topics at the intersection of power relationships between language codes that play in for different institutions...

Diachronic

How do the relationships among terms distribute over time?

• Recall: Marked and Unmarked terms

Do marked and unmarked terms change positions, communtation of key terms, development and breaking of equations?

Which key terms seem to be rising in power?

• On everyone's list?

Over time, you'll see sets of equivalencies that are either

• Copied and expanded, or
• Broken

e.g. Obama dismantled the term "War on Terror"

• War on Terro became nostalgia

Diachronic analysis seeks

• Points of take-off, rupture, reversal in the use of terms
• How do terms spread?

Code: world, medium, reflexivity

"Codes organize size in meaningful systems which correlate signifiers and signified through the structural forms of syntagms and paradigms. (Chandler 147)

"Code is a set of practices familiar to users of the medium operating within a broad cultural framework." (Chandler 148)

All signs achieve meaning by virtue of their place within or against a system of code.

• Multiple codes at play in society
• Which one is dominant (in a given moment)?

Codes

Social codes

• Verbal language, bodily code, commodity code, behavioral code
• e.g. Individuals within academia

Textual codes

• Science, mathematics, aesthetics, rhetoric with stylistic forms, mass media codes, new media codes

Interpretive codes

• Perceptual readings, ideological reception, standing as negotiated oppositional
• e.g. Academia in society

Medium is the techne within which articulation occurs

• Techne is not limited to tecnology in the material or technical sense
• Medium is the arrangement of the materials and signs that much up practice and become situated, negotiated and make up power

To be a semiotician ...

"You have to be hard, independent. Call things as you see them."

Thematizing code

Thematizing is an operation that one takes out of a range of possible choices to bring to attention a trajectory

• Work of code as it enters practice, becomes lively in practice
• Seeing how code operates

Not just that terms are all related within themselves

• But they are part of human sensing and experience

Thematize terms as these become the signified from the signfiers of human engagement

Gestalt psychology: Foreground (dominant code), Background (recessive code)

• Look for "holes" and "how holes develop"
• Method is focused on listening
  • Not hanging on a single word or phrase but hearing "through" the "song" of speech
  • Hearing "beyond the words"

Social realities: Constructed worlds

• What is the driving force to getting the social reality secured?
• What happens if there is a rupture in social reality?
• Look at moments of rupture in which things that can't/won't talk can&do
  • e.g. speech from the Emperor at the power plan in Fukushima

Social identity: looks at code participation, items of resistance

• Acts of struggle
• You can pursue this question indefinitely
• Major theme of critical studies, communication

Social differentiation: Looking & the gaze reproduced from over-determination of self (in recognition and respect of difference)

• Gestures that stand in for communication but really perform other functions
• Look at different social codes at different times
  • Trace the meaning of a gesture and its unexpected reduplication
• Where is the flâneur?

Semiotic analysis

Semiotics calls forth productive moments

• Where saying certain things has additional meaning

Natalie Maines from Dixie Chicks

• Speaking out at Shepher'd Bush Theatre, England, March 10, 2003
• Country music - conventionally associated with patriotism
• At this moment, what it means to be American, female, singer, country, Texan, etc. were in flux/uncertain

How things are coded is less an issue of debate but how they are performed

Sample project: look at the contested space in which code comes into conflict

Reflecting on semiotics

Not a precise methods

Leaves culture out

• In terms of deeper meaning, hermeneutics

Idea of how to reconstruct the past on terms other than what we've become comfortable with

Symbolic Interaction

Different but related method to semiotics

What is the relation between hierarchies and equality?

• Semiotics sees the end of this in hegemony
• Symbolic action is more pluralistic

Sometimes one person has authority and sometimes they don't

• What does it mean to speak? To listen?

One thing that human beings do is learn to communicate

• To adjust expectations of power relationships to one another

In communication, we engage in context and contextual transformations

• We do so as a learned skill, a learned way of doing things

Model for symbolic action is an anthropology of interaction

• Words are "equipment for living" (rituals, customs, practices)
• More anthropological than archaeological on questions on language and social order

Keyword of symbolic interaction is act

• Key thing to understand is context

In symbolic interaction, there is no past or future but what we make up

• We live in a constantly evolving present
• "Spreadable present"

Symbols and Communication

Communication is not a big player in semiotics

• But it is key to symbolic action because there is a possibility for peer communication, equality
  • Which is why this is a pluralistic system

Human beings learn to use language and become embedded in it before structures of grammar and propriety are made plain

• It involves reflection through "I"
• It is discovered and learned through play
• "Me" is constructed through reflections on what is expected
• Human self is a construct of a unique individual and learning what is available through a growing social group: family, friends, school, professions, etc.

Learning is progressive

• Learning occurs through maturation, increasing cognitive complexity
• What is reasonable with some people is not reasonable with others: matters of taste

Sometimes communication leads to understanding and sympathy and sometimes it becomes a mess

• There is pressure to repair it, make live negotiable

Pluralistic society: have to draw lines around what is unreasonable

• But have flexible lines of reasonable to learn new things

Significant symbols

• Some words have more meaning than others
• Some terms command our attention, respect, revulsion

"Emotions, as well as thought and will, are learned in communication"

Social drama is the drama of legitimation with the goal of community stability

• Symbolic meaning is the surplus that exceeds the particular case
• For example, Martha Stewart is jailed for insider trading. The events of the drama exceed her individual transgression. But her being jailed is intended to restore confidence.
  • Also TSA security performances...
• For the semiotician, there is less meaning there than meets the eye
• For symbolic action, there is potentially even more

What symbolizes interest in an area may change?

• "Successful entrepreneur" shifts from clean cut Wall Street lifer to grungy Silicon Valley

"Symbols are directly observable data of meaning in social relationships" (50)

• Duncan's goal was to "undo sociology"
• Tension in sociology: "Is society built on structures or memetic activities?"
  • Duncan attempting to identify the role of memetic forms in social relationships
• Observable data that can gain insight into "institutional context"

Three possible arrangements for symbolic exchange:

• Top-to-Bottom
• Bottom-to-Top
• Peer-to-Peer: equality

Social courtship is highly artful

• Put into play social conventions but both sides know that there is an element of disingenuity
• Obedience to suboptimal terms sustains communication as an ambiguous space where difference and agreement don't necessarily have to come to the surface

Some risk is valued in discourse: bon mot, small jokes, double-meanings

• Too formal == dull, you only say what others expect
• Too idiosyncratic, expressive == undisciplined

Social change occurs within and around social courtship

• When the difference in power is no longer tolerable: confrontation
• In Hegel's "master/slave" relationship, the slave holds the upper hand because the master becomes dependent over time
  • The slave has every incentive to overturn those relations

Social order

"Social order ... is a social drama in which actors struggle to uphold, destroy, or change principles of order which are believed 'necessary' to social integration" (Duncan, 63)

• The drama of a community is over the maintenance of authority, as performed roles take on partisan trajectories in the struggle to purify motives.

We develop understandings of best communicative practices

• These change over time
• Locus of authority changes over time

"Authority" may sound illiberal because

• Authority is a bad word for semioticians
• But for the social interaction, authority is found among the contestation of frames

Structures of social action

Duncan is compatible with Burke, "A grammar of motives"

• Burke performs his notions through the language he uses
• Duncan simplifies his thinking into small actionable chunks
  • Duncan is from a sociology background

See Duncan's 5 characteristics of "the structure of social action" (67)

• Scene, where & when
• Act, what the act does
• Agent, who does the act
• Agency, how is it done
• Purpose, why is it done

In any instance of social action, all of these qualities are in play

• But they may be working to greater or less degrees

Social institutions

Social institutions = most directly observable units of action of society

• Family
• Government
• Economic institutions
• Defense
• Education
• Manners etiquette (pure forms of sociability)
• Entertainment
• Health and welfare
• Religion
• Art
• Science and technology

These may be combined into hybrid institutions:

• e.g. Family + Economic institutions = Housing market
• e.g. Government + Entertainment = "The Governator"

How do the motivation structures coalesce?

Multiple trajectories for these hybrids

• Reputation: what is the ethos of a good/poor institutional (role) performance?

Demand of new media:

• How do you extent manners and etiquette to new situations?

Audiences addressed

How is the audience constructed?

• When you find a text, count the personal pronouns
  • They, We, Us, He, etc.

How is the writer/speaker positioning this message?

• By searching for pronouns, we discover an act that gets us from one place to another

They

• Not like us
• The undifferentiated public
• The "enemy"
• The discarded
• Re: Fanon: "the wretched of the Earth"

We

• Those who are committed, dedicated, anointed, chosen
• Relation that individuals have to a center
• Exclusivity, periphery
• "We are not certain of you and whether you belong"
• Power in transition: we can be renewed by "expanding horizons"
  • "Re-committed"
  • "New blood"
  • Social reproduction

Sometimes performance of arguments is about identity of the group

• But really when you are performing language from the point of view of "we", the question ought to be: "what does this say about you?"

"We" is a language of insecurity and discomfort: "Do I really belong?"

• Also, a language of conspiracy: "How can I appear that I belong?"

University can be a hectic place to be "we"

• But if you are there, you are lifting heavy weight

You

A position of equality

• Address to peer or peers

Re: Buber's work on dialogue, I and Thou

• Speaking beyond hierarchy to things that genuinely matter, of mutual interest

Peer dialogue does not depend on codes and standards

You presumes

• Equality
• Reciprocity
• Transparency

Formal, institutionally-arranged "you" exist

• But informal "you" speaks through this

I, Me

Internal dialogue

• Soliloquy

Do you flatter yourself?

• Or do you dismantle yourself?

It

Authority, impartiality

It can remove agency

• "It is asserted that..."

It is a "condition of fact which invokes its authority"

• It is taken-for-granted, the natural, the standard

It == as if nature is peaking

TODO

Find a significant symbol

Jump offs

Boltansky and Thebeneau on Justification

July 12

My significant symbol:

• http://v.gd/comcastzzz

Going for a "two-fer"

• Accomplish more than 1 goal with the project you have in mind
• Have an idea of where this project will go?
  • Journal? Conference?

Reviewing symbolic interaction of yesterday ...

Symbolic interaction, dramatism

• Doesn't reduce conflict
• Conflict leads to acts of encounter
• Encounter results in a surplus of meaning

Any drama is an act that influences in expected and unexpected ways

• Protagonist initiates action
• Antagonist suffers consequences or resists

Questions:

• How was the scene set?
• What was the act?
• Agency?
• Purpose?
• How did things turn out? How did the act result in a drama?

Assumption of "arbitrary" in semiotics

• Connection between signifier and signified is arbitrary

In symbolic interaction, "arbitrary" means:

• You can't know what matters until you get into it
• What everyone's talking about might be boring but what is being overlooked / incidental could be suggestive/important?

Example term: "Facebook depression"

• A term that is being naturalized
• What you would do: Examine how it is socially constructed.
  • What is the evidence?
  • How is it named?
  • How is it split into codes?
  • How are the codes used?

Social Drama

"Social drama involves every art and science of symbolic expression" (Duncan 160)

Many agreements involving language are "partial agreements"

Symbolic interaction does not follow the law of identity or law of contradiction

• When we use terms, the negative always accompanies the affirmative (and vice versa)
• As words take on meaning, unfold in mutual interaction, communication is the play of the affirmative/negative, emergence of position over time

Story of the text and the role that it performs

• Why do the principles appear to be at stake?
• How might critical insight change what is at stake?

What is a "significant symbol"?

Material in some way

• Evocative
• Invites meaning or response
• Inspire public response

Can be very public

• Evoked in different ways
  • So the meaning changes
• Create moments of anticipation
  • With expectations about what the development/rewarding of a symbol mean

Each performance includes potential model or counter-model

• Invites imitation, reproduction

Reflection

At the very beginning, symbol provokes reflection

e.g. Keats + Grecian Urn

• "Ode on a Grecian Urn", 1919

Often, we think of communication as having effects

• • Climate of opinion
  • Common interpretation of roles, behavior
  • Social expectations on a wide scale
• But it's not a "mechanism of effects"
  • Individuals reflect and find symbols meaningful
• Reflection is the first turn toward a significant symbol

Reflection is a response to what is evoked

• Dialogue of the "I" and the "Me"

Fusion

Key trope of a symbolic act is metaphor

• Evocation

Evocation may be conditioned by ideological position

• or national identity

E.g. photo of NYSE with American flag

• Fusion of many symbols
• Terms are not there by happenstance
• They have meaning in fusion

Surplus

Re: homelessness + shopping carts

• Camping out in front of the Federal Post Office on Colorado

Making homeless visible

• Inspire sympathy (support, donation, ...)

Symbols in action

1. Games
2. Play
3. Parties
4. Festivals
5. Ceremonies
6. Drama
7. Rites

• Are these forms exclusive?
• Are there other forms?

4 types of games

Re: Roger Callois on games

• He suggests that they are cross-cultural
• GTG wonders if there might be different types for games women play?

The ideal form of a game is paradigm

• Standard for play
• Doesn't exhaust or define it
• But is a "style" of play
  • Imitated, copied, parodied until people get tired
• Games are like fashions
  • Spread, popularity of discourse ebbs, flows like fashion

Games in practice as custom

• People have played them before
• Offers opportunity for mastery
• Also, novelty revives, renews old ways of playing

In any game, there are symmetries and asymmetries

• Make asymmetries greater or reduce them
• Power differences within a field of play
  • Referee can do things that players cannot

Agonistics

Meaning comes out of struggle, competition

• Regulated conflict

e.g. Debate, law, sports

• Victories have meaning, symbolic meaning
• Meaning is in the thrill of play

Corruption

• You want play to determine the outcome of a game
  • Not a biased referee

Generative of strategic thinking

• Communicating by responding to another's strategy, outcome

Games can divide a community

• Even when their is more than justice at play
• Strategy/counter-strategy
• e.g. public trials
  • "Forensic democracy"?

Alea

Probability, chance

• Set up conditions of outcome
• Determined by fate, roll of the dice
• Players take risk
  • One side benefits
  • One side bears costs

e.g. Science, gambling

Corruption

• Odds are fixed so that one side always benefits, displaced risk
• e.g. "Hazards" in Wall St.

System positions change viz presumption or standards for accepting or rejecting "truth"

• Some people are willing to take or or fewer risks
• e.g. Alea at heart of biopolitics: who can take which risks at what time?

Mimicry

Imitation, courting

• Pretend
• Wear a mask

Put situations, roles into play

• That are appropriate, useful but not your personal, everyday
• Useful in courtship

Simulation

• Actor takes on a ritual mask
• Commands the terror formerly reserved only for mysterious powers that be
• Actor displays authority, is given respect
  • Though audience recognizes that the actor is just another person
  • Affiliation

e.g.

• Religion
  • Pope speaking ex cathedra, makes visible institutional authority
• Dance, painting
• MMORPG
• Tourism by cruise ship, wearing a mask of pleasure
  • Accidents at sea
  • Re: Porter, Ship of fools

Corruption

• Mask demands more adherence than it is worth
• Unmasking leads to disaffiliation

Imitation figures the real in relation to fiction

• Doubles the world

What happens when you look behind the curtain?

• More curtains?

Mimicry allows us to participate in mystery

• Part of the drama is confusion
• Who gets to participate: how + why?

Ilinx

Sublime, novelty

• Game of losing balance and recovery
• Entering disorder to recover order

e.g. Economic bubbles

• Euphoria catches on
• People stop calculating risk well (like good Alea players should)
• Don't know why and don't care who is wearing a mask
  • Because it is so thrilling to play

Language game of disorientation

• Can be positive or negative
• Self-induced panic motivates people
  • Momentary chaos
  • Thrilling, dizzying, pleasurable

Symbolic interaction in Communication / Media

Social movements Particular artifacts (or genre of artifacts) from an aesthetic point of view

• How do they invite (or comment upon) communication?
• e.g. shipwrecks

Our significant symbols

Comcast sleepers

• http://www.savetheinternet.com/archive/2008/02/25/comcast-blocking-first-the-internet-now-the-public/

Evocation: opening-up, means of making connection

• Not simply an "a-ha" but a starting point, beginning of a trajectory

TODO

Meeting with GTG on Friday

• Identify an artifact/genre in advance

Some tools to stir up thinking:

• http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/

Another place to look for secondary:

• Encyclopedia of Social Science
• Speech Yearbook; Communication Yearbook

July 13

Symbolic interaction: anthropological point of view

• How does one live as a human being?
• What sort of risks are you willing to take?

What is a significant symbol?

Evocative

• Of public OR personal meaning

Symbols that re-appear overtime in a conversation

Symbol can be struggled over, contested

• "Family"
• "Constitution"
• 16th Amendment

In analysis, look for God terms and Devil terms

• God terms: hope
• Devil terms: fear and anger

Governing structure of the myth: Providence

• Christian conservative myth: Fall and Recovery
• Reagan: uses comic post-modern actor
• GW Bush: Born Again: conservative Christian + language of a recovering alcoholic

Symbolic interaction: reframe the perspective

• Look through the clusters, taken literally, to a different perspective

"Examining terministic screens"

• Doesn't get at the normative work that a text does
• Looks at how a text constructs a normative point of view

Symbolic analysis incorporates these from Burke's 'motives'

• Scene, what
• Act, when/where
• Agent, who
• Agency, how
• Purpose, why

Looking into: How stories dramatize meaning

More examples of significant symbols

• http://hillbuzz.org/2011/04/05/theres-a-new-strategy-to-cut-down-the-number-of-illegal-immigrants-caught-crossing-our-border/
• http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-outthere4apr04,1,7251622.story

Silhouette

• Action
• Location (who can see it? Drivers approaching the frontera)

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajmal_Kasab

"Global wear"

• "Anti-global agenda"

Symbolic interaction isn't only to explain the event in itself but to find comparison(s) in a larger context

• Youth
• Cults
• Brainwashing
• Fervor
• Violence
• Anarchy

Symbolic interaction in internet

Symbolic interaction requires large corpus

Google Trends

• http://google.com/trends?q=terrorism

Rhetorical movement study

• Changing meaning, use of terms over time
• Set off by events: speech, bomb blast, Congressional vote, etc.
• Reconstructive work, building a timeline

Adding a kind of temporality to the web that you normally don't see

• Things get taken up and put down

Mixed-method work, e.g. "cell phone in the 1990s"

• Public talk about the cell phone
• Access archive of internal industry documents
• Interviews with employees, customers

General public story gives you...

• Interesting moments
• Frames for asking questions
• Vocabulary

Guilt-redemption cycle

Human beings are fallible yet hunger for perfection (Duncan, 137)

• "Communication that fails leads to frustration"
• "Communication that is sustained but emptied creates guilt"

Mortification

• Television goes on and on about mortification
• Make sacrifices and do things you wouldn't otherwise do
• e.g. Fast food goes organic

Guilt-shame results in renewal or rebirth

• Move from the place one is, disturbances, to a place of renewal, new commitment
• e.g. "McDonald's gone organic"

Symbolic movement is located in the personal

• Becomes political as one makes movements to kill the other

Crisis frame: Judgement

Symbolic action occurs because people are dissatisfied

• Story is told to address this dissatisfaction

e.g. when Bush declared victory on the carrier

• Retread of Margaret Thatcher on carrier after Falklands (Malvinas) War

Epochal frame: The Moment

Epochal frame: celebration of mystery

• Surplus leads to national mystery that is sublime

Comparing triumphant French revolution leader (modern)

• To fall of Saddam statue (postmodern)

Tragic frame: Acceptance

Visual comparison

• Flag covered coffins returning from Iraq (May 23 2009)
• AIDS quilt (December 1 2006

These may seem different but how do they compare?

• Visibility for the community to accept and endure what is difficult?
• Verb: to cover, what is being covered?
• Color, pattern: Special significance?

Grotesque frame: Rejection

Things aren't exactly right

• Not about accept/reject but "curiosity, guilty pleasure"

Invites you to reimagine, reinvent what is common or available

• In new ways
• Talk about things that aren't talked about
• Deal with ambivalent feelings

• Significant symbol?
  • Analyst stands on the outside
• Parody?
  • Analyst must participate
  • Analyst doesn't accept but forced on you not to reject

Comic Frame: Symbols, Figure

• Epoch: surplus to the level of mystery
• Tragic: surplus taken to the level of event
• Parody: surplus taken to a level that must be participated but kinda funky

Comic is preferred mode for symbolic interaction

• Accident, error
• Something is amiss or wrong
• Makes less of a situation that might be otherwise
• Allows other to lose and save face at the same time

Comedy lets us sort, awared, restrict

• Symbolic interaction let's us have a comic worldview and lessen the seriousness

Other frames?

Anonymous Frame?

• New sort of aesthetics afforded by new media?

Pragmatics

Positivism and priority of clarity, sense

• Problem with communication: Everyone speaks a lot of non-sense
• People are misunderstanding each other because of language

Humanities: heuristic bias, imprecise thought

• "Life of the mind", aristocratic, putting on airs, ivory tower

Historical context

Post-WWI:

• Dying for country? What is that?
• Language can be used to divide and motivate
  • Families with sacrifice their children

Pragmatics is European counterpart to American study of speech

Communication starts to develop as a discipline and field

• In relation to democratic practice
• People don't learn to talk or communicate by class
• But it is a skill that can be learned
• And needs to be learn for the practice of democracy
  • Effective complaining
  • Articulation of one's interests

Pragmatics in Europe is a kind of "post-Holocaust" work

• How do you break out of disciplinary hierarchies?

From hierarchy (which can be co-opted) to listening to reasons in everyday world

• Give them credit for being serviceable

Communication is a site for the practice of reasoning

• Prudential reasoning is always bounded
• Bounded by forms of communication that you have found serviceable

Through pragmatics, people become socialized

Prudence: Aristotelian word

• Close to "common sense"
• On the ground judgement
• Common sense is always bounded
• A rule adapted from one situation and extended may be the wrong rule

Communicative repair work

• Is brought into play because our communication is trial-and-error

You are looking for forms that go into sense-making

• How the structure of language invites inference
  • i.e. I meet certain conditions and expectations such that, if I say something, you know what I mean
  • i.e. Expectations are raised and counters are made available

Pragmatics assumes a voluntarist position

• Rather than words evoking (as they do in teh symolic world)
• They are put into a pattern that society conventionalizes and people work through
  • Don't have to make a drama out of everything
  • You can simply repair things

Prudence is a normative concept

• Separates what's good from bad
• Embodied in communication: what rules make for ideal communication? How can we recognize systematic distortion communication?
• Part of the work of pragmatics is normative
• Want to identify the rules of pragmatics at an everyday level
  • See communication operating in its least bounded form
  • Paradigm == conversation (particularly conversation with the intent of coming to agreement)
  • Dialogues == conversation heavy
• What kind of speech activities are available to conversants who are interested in creating conversation based on consensus (in Habermas "based on force of the better argument")?

Tomorrow = what are the rules of the conversational situation

If you have particular institutions, insufficient time for ideal conversation

• How to limit them?
• Given asymmetries of knowledge and risk
• And insufficient, non-ideal time/context

TODO

Thinking more about tracking changes to a single URL

• Check the page every n minutes and see if it has changed

Jump offs

APA would not repudiate torture

• Major falling out
• Long debate over multiple years + conventions
• Insight into how discipline + punishment is constituted in the US

July 14

Goals for the class:

• Assembling a range of methods
• Each will require further thought, practice, investigation to be applicable
• Methods will become increasingly mixed over time
• Thinking about the internet as a tool for providing resources
  • Particularly for the assembly of a text (micro + macro)
• What tools are useful for observing internet exchange?

If there's a subtext to the course...

• How can comm methods be adapted to digital contexts?

Assembling terms for Google Trends

Search should be guided by Eros and Thanatos (via Freudian psycho-analysis)

• Eros: language games come into play and should be spread
  • Key terms get at a common speech act
  • Associate the terms
• Thanatos: run out of energy
  • Come to an end

Comissive speech acts

• Certain kinds of expectations

From Pragmatics, distill a norm from which reciprocal influences come into play

• From an analytic point of view: what the speech activity ought to do
• From a pledge, to a promise

Watch for moments of transition

• e.g. Global Warming: if that heats up your imagination, you'll recognize when terms shift
• "Ears tuned" to clusters or associations of terms that seem to be volcanic, erupting

Under stress (Eros)

• Terms raised to a community of purpose, use

Continually draw back:

• What does this mean?
• What do I do?

Such is our burden.

Rhetorical movement: shifts in the liveliness of terms

Pragmatics overview (David J. Parnell)

Defining "pragmatics":

• the study of a natural language speaker's ability to communicate information other than what they are explicitly stating
• Inference, communication above and beyond the utterance, semantics/syntax
  • "Sometimes we can't SAY things but we comment on them anyway"
• Not interested in the specific verbiage itself
• Nuances: rhetoric, sarcasm, tonal inflection, word syntax, arrangement, context

Solution/response to philosophical quandary: How to know other minds? We can't.

• Is communication a fiction?
• Social interaction, transaction

Coordinate meaning through interaction/transaction by drawing inferences through the implicit rules of exchange

• Never fully stated but they are regularly visible/audible

Pragmatics calls attention to a range of factors (rhetoric, sarcasm)

• Pragmatics goes beyond the formal rules of the talk

Everyday talk is filled with people who are reflective about their talk

• You see reflection wherever those expectations are violated:
  • People will get them back in line if the communication is important

Reason is imminent to the practices of communication

• Which allow us to socially coordinate our lives in a fairly efficient fashion

Failure to communicate?

• Tried to repair?
• Game over. We move on.

Pragmatics sees communication as a problem

• You have it and you're done
• Move on to the next and next and next...

Pragmatics:

• Democratic theory of language use
• Optimistic
• Reduces questions to What do you want to do?
• Always has room for improvement, accounting for the particulars

Within an institution or organization:

• Constant on-going conversation regarding best practice
• Pragmatics is very useful for looking at roles within institutions
  • Determining reasonable/reliable standards for communication
• Drawing pragmatics out of common conversation
  • Thereby institutions

William James

(via Bruce Kucklick, xiv)

Heart of pragmatism is in these lectures

• Touring speaker
• Writing in plain language

What is "true"?

• James believed a belief was true if in the long run it worked for all of us and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world

James moves words from something that simply ornaments ideas to

• Words shaping the reality in which we participate
• The meaning of our words come back to us as the consequences of our action

Religion (and God) (which divided lots of people) was not a driver of the world directly

• But religion drives the world by provided norms and boundaries for a community that lead it to thrive (or not)

"Say unto other people as you would have them say to you"

Survival of the fittest in the short-term puts pressure on pragmatics

Those that could create systems of communication, bring more people into play would be freer and better

What is the difference between long-run and short-run communicative strategies and norms?

Basic pre-conditions:

• If you want to be understood, this is what matters.
• Beyond that are nuances, context details

George Herbert Mead

• Language is learned throguh play of self and other
• Communication conditions our self as it seeks wider scope - coherence and correspondence
• The ideal-type of communicator is the neighborly engineer: hospitality & reliability
  • (Was neighborly-ness an early 20th c. invention?)
• Mind, Self and Society rationalizes society
• Communication serves emancipatory ends

And more...

Ordinary Language Philosophy v. Logical Positivism

• Mostly an "Oxford crew"
• Austin, Ryle, Hart, Strawson, Searle, Wittgenstein

Austin, How to do things with words

"We can mean what we say and say what we mean"

• Communication can be done more or less effectively, successfully

Structural-functional pragmatics: The communicative uses of terms

• Referential: symbol corresponds to context and names situated object, law, mind
  • Engages in naming
• Expressive: explicative interruption pointing back to a state
  • Rhetoric moves people into a particular state (working up, cooling off)
  • Not just emotional appeals but bringing in front of the audience something they should attend to
• Conative: address the addressee. Imperatives and vocatives
  • "Help!", "Do this."
  • Setting in place, conditions
• Poetic: attraction through to form
  • Calls attention to the use of language as it works through its moment
  • A lot of play of Eros and Thanatos, sometimes they reverse themselves
  • A way of making meaning for an audience so that they can participate virtually in the form
    • You can enjoy a staged terror act without being literally terrorized
• Phatic: draw into contact - ritual touch
• Reflexive: code and position strategies
  • Our work in class
  • e.g. project about the differences between pledges, promises, commitments
    • ("Promise" is an archetypal speech act)

Language does a lot of work

• For any text, you need to decide which types of speech acts you are paying attention to
• Poetics & Expressives often work well together

Pragmatics = Context

The study of how speakers organize what they say in accordance with who they're talking to, where, when , and under what circumstances (Yule, 3)

• Similar to symbolic interaction but focus on "organize"

Contextual renderings hypothesize "how listeners can make inference about what is said to arrive at an interpretation of the speaker's meaning" (Yule, 3)

The unsaid and unspoken is reconstructed as the goes without saying or cannot be said

Text always unfolds over time

• Different readings, contexts, performances
• Emic, analysis of a single performance of a text
• Etic, analysis of a text over time (responses, development, formulations, etc.)

What is said, written, performed involves an audience

• Essentially an efficient decision

Deixis

How does language construct time and space?

• Who can say what?
• How is meaning made given boundaries?

"Terms that point"

• Center-proximal: this, here, now
• Distance-distal: that, there, then

Clock time different from Calendar time

• Clock is mechanical
• Calendar is seasonal, connected to nature

What is pure calendar time?

Pragmatics:

• What can be shared when?

Decorum = Propriety = Bienséance

Regularity characterizes language use.

If you want to know if there are rules for communication, try violating them and see what happens.

How does one read pauses, interruptions, or silences?

How and when are conventions challenged?

Communication depends on a capacity to "read"

• To understand pauses, silences
• One small different thing can lead to a re-reading of something that is otherwise unremarkable
  • Indicators

Speech Acts

"An action performed by the use of an utterance to communicate" (Yule, 134)

• Locution: the basic act of uttering a meaningful linguistic form (131)
• Illocution: An utterance with communicative force
  • Communicative force is not only the meaning but the meaning in context where you can draw an inference
• Perolocution: The persuasive effect of a speech act
  • Inducements, strategic positioning, weight given/taken away from the speech act
  • Strategically shape response

Reference as speec activity

Refer: an act that is formed in the interest of directing attentino to something

Infer: what the addressee must undertake to determine meaning

Reference depends on local knowledge-doxa

Convention: you know the status of a speech act because of convention within a community

• e.g. "Hey! How are ya?" / "Good" : "I thought you'd never ask! Blah blah..."

Intertextuality: We learn to communicate through imitation, may not have reflected on the use of various media, expressions

Rhetorical cognition: how do you know who "we" are? or what "we" can infer"? or what is appropriate for "us"?

• Refer to practices with inference structures that can be extended
• A cognition that can only go on in a discussion where no one person "owns" the meaning
• No way to access that without something like rhetorical cognition

Figuring the reference

Positioning of the terms confirms the perolocution effect

Anaphora: antecedent references accumulate in a discourse.

• "Six potatoes. (They) are sliced and diced..."

Cataphora

• Precedes reference. Move from abstract to concrete.
• "He left abruptly. (The President) closed the meaning."

Ellipsis

• Meaning retained through repetition, no expression needs to be stated

Perolocutionary effect:

• How is it being done? Learn tropes and figures
• Develop an ear for these figures
• They are on americanrhetoric.com (see below)

Presupposition and Entailment

Presupposition: What the speaker understands to be the capacity, relevancy to the addressee?

• You can never be sure that you've reconstructed ALL of the presuppositions
• But you can make a logical move: In order for them to assemble this utterance, they must have made some of these assumptions
  • Requires critic to reconstruct context

Entailment: something that logically follows

• Sentences, not speakers, have entailments (Yule, 25)
• Sentences offer data

One is able to infer ...

• Potential: inference to context
• Existential: existence of the named
• Factive: standing of the phemenon
• Lexical: meaning of the associated term
• Structural: position e.g., When did he leave?
• Counterfactual: dream, fantasy

Cooperation and implicature

• Tautology: repeats
• Implicature: infers

Conversation is seen as the ideal form of communication

• As opposed to dialogue
• Much less therapeutic

Ideals:

• Quantity: as much info and no more
• Quality: true and evidenced
• Relation: relevant
• Manner: perspicuous, clear, precise, brief, orderly

Pragmatist view of communication: "Waste not. Want not."

• Interested in conversation

Departures from ideal are not categorically bad

• But the ideals gives us a way to locate deviation from the norms

The failure of cooperation

Alice in Wonderland constant interruption, contestation

• Does it matter which way I go?
• Not to me.

Conversation = Cooperation; Debate = Competition

• Not so simple in practice
• But debate still requires cooperation of a kind
• And conversation still has an element of competition

In lively conversation, presuppositions may be miscalculated

• Response before inference is solidified
• Does this require correction?
• Or do you follow a new path?

Class, culture-based

• Americans may prefer debate, contest alternative discourse
  • American lawyers frequently raise objections

In a good institution

• You should be able to draw inferences, enter into debate, etc.
• In Alice in Wonderland, the world is upside-down and you cannot engage

Benson & Hedges

One thing that we do is hedge our bets

• Where are the hedges?
• Qualifiers position communication as what we're willing to offer, what we can say with reasonable security, where we are in our thinking
• Hedge to signal that we are open to discussion
  • But also that we don't want to be turned down

Hedge qualifications:

• Quality: "as far as I know..."
• Quantity: "long story short..."
• Relation: "anyway..."
• Manner: "not clear to me..."
• Opt out: "let's not discuss it..."
• Other: "as my mom would say..."
• Skepticism: "you'll won't believe it but..."

"Let's try to talk about it if we can..."

"I can't talk about this without my lawyer present..."

"Off the record..."

Conversational implicature

"The basic assumption in conversation is that, unless otherwise indicated, the participants are adhering to the cooperative principle and maxims" (40)

Felicity conditions

• Language common: no nonsense
• Content: the form carries content
  • Compatibility, form + content work together
• Sincerity conditions: intends to carry out
  • Promises made
  • Big big deal in pragmatics, not a big deal in semiotics/symbolic interaction
    • (Semiotics: Agency less important than institutions)
    • (Symbolic interaction: Always sincere + insincere at the same time)
  • People are going to be unhappy if they find out it's false
• Essential condition: constitutive
  • By using a term, you put it into play, define it
  • e.g. handshake constitutive of a commitment

Infelicitous promise - conditions under which the communication does not communicate

• Don't have complete access to the language
  • e.g. Contracts with cell phone companies
• Cannot be accessed as code
• Form bars assimilation of meaning
• Intention to deceive - one way belief
  • You'll say anything that's right
  • Reduced to perolocution
  • Once it is discovered, it's all over
• Do not have the power to commit

Speech acts: Direct & Indirect

• Declarative: acts that "change the world via their utterance" (53)
  • Words that are used in a ritual way
• Representative: acts that state what the speaker believes is the case
• Commisive: speech act in which the speaker commits him or herslf to some future action, e.g. a promise" (Yule 128)
  • e.g. Hypocratic Oath
• Directive: "A speech act used to get someone else to do something, e.g. an order" (129)
• Expressive: "A speech act in which the speaker expresses feelings or attitudes, e.g. an apology" (129)

How do speakers move among these types of acts?

• Which is front and center?

Speech events

• Content condition Utterance must specific conditions
• Preparatory condition Movement to set up a context where speech act is meaningful

Event: "A speech event is an activity in which participants interact via language in some conventional way to arrive at some outcome." (Yule, 57)

• Felicity Question-Answer, Request-Response
• Infelicity Question-Unanswer, Request-Demand

Pledge

Negative trust - Confidence spiral

Why do the Republicans not want to raise taxes at all? Won't even consider it?

• What are the pragmatics of the act to not raise taxes?

George Bush Sr. used anaphora: "They'll come to me once and ask me, will you raise taxes? And I'll say no. They'll come to me twice and ask me, will you raise taxes? And I'll say no. They'll come to me three times and ask me, will you raise taxes? And I'll say, Read my lips: No new taxes!"

Today's Tea Party congresspeople remember this broken promise

• Limits the pragmatic grounds of what can be said

Speech acts are a spiral

• Distrust and confidence compound one another in a spiral downward
• Speech acts doesn't just sit there like a syllogism
• It is repeated, grows, circulates

Tip of the hat, wag of the finger, anger and mildness formalized

Politeness, in an interaction...the means employed to show awareness of another person's face" - maneuvering distance

• Face is the "public self-image of a person" (p 60)
• Face saving act
• Face threatening act
• Negative face: independence, freedom so offer deference
• Positive face: accepted, liked, so connect
• Say nothing-on the record. Pre-request-hedge.

e.g. politics gets more partisan as face-saving options are removed

The risks of face may lead to the break off of communication

Jump offs

Sylva Rhetoricae

• http://rhetoric.byu.edu/

Figures, devices with examples

• http://www.americanrhetoric.com/rhetoricaldevicesinsound.htm

July 18

Coming up soon:

• Multi-modal
• "How do you read a website?"
• "Meme hunt"
  • What is a meme?
  • What do memes give you access to?
  • How to construct a memetic space? Narrative of a meme
  • e.g. "damage control" viz Rupert Murdoch

Monday and Tuesday: multi-modal, memetics

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthymeme
• Readings coming soon

This week:

• End of pragmatics
• Conversational analysis

Content analysis: not GTG's cup of tea

• How you do content and why
• Paul Google Docs example
• GTG example
• Kevin NLTK

Critical discourse analysis

• Kind of like symbolic interaction from a Foucauldian standpoint
  • Answer is always: "power wins"; "hegemony is true"
• Language Constrains; constitutes

Karen Tracey

• Golden age for gathering info on public debates
• e.g. local community / legislatures discussing definition of marriage

Back to pragmatics

Everyday practice is reasonable

• People pay attention to what makes sense to them
• They will read through and discount that which is interesting/stimulating but which matters less than arriving at a judgement
• Discourse of experts is accountable to language of the life-world
  • Life-world rewards people with acuity and ability to make/refine good judgements
• Part of judgement-making is learning to make and evaluate speech acts

Pragmatics is similar to Aristotle's understanding of rhetoric

• Select words in between the extremes (saying too much / too little)
• Use time available to arrive at a collaborative decision
• Process supports self-feeding trajectory
• Good outcomes, better discourse = better speech

Partisanship

Symbolic interaction: Who controls definition of situation, causes?

• In the public sphere: it's already partisan
• If your views are favored, you gain power.
• Idea is to engage in a drama
• Goal: make it look like your position considers the good of the people, your opponent is being jejune
  • Develop a drama

When should partisanship cease and doing the right thing should return?

• Are some appeals beyond the pale?
  • Too violent, too bigoted to have good outcomes

From pragmatic standpoint: Posturing is never good language use

• Doesn't lead to action
• Distanced from the drama of engagement
• Insiders figure out how to mobilize political drama
  • Calculate what positions they are in, in terms of pressing agendas
  • How to essentially break from gambits that are no longer proper?

Public discourse

• Inside is pragmatic, strategic
• Outside drama is symbolic interaction
• Partisanship: outside drama may overwhelm the strategy

Pragmatics can be used to

• Plan, strategize partisan drama
• But also be reflexive, identify when we've gone beyond the pale

In the private, professional sphere

• Pragmatics has to do with practical judgement
• How do you negotiate language/communication under conditions of asymmetrical risk + power?

To be part of a profession is to be part of an institution

• Institutions have rituals of certification
• Knowledge claims are bounded by command are particular methods
• Limited variety of topics, choices upon which your information bears
• Professions often split into specialists
• Language is lively, continuing to change
  • Partisan but negotiated

Asymmetry of power

• One person has the need
• Another person has the resources

Asymmetry of risk

• Professionally, one party may expend resources but not achieve the desired need
  • Or one party may need to learn something they need to know but they don't want to spend the time

Pragma- Dialectical Rules

As a method...

• Tries to posit rules that are there implicit in all conversations designed to reach agreements
• Builds from the speech act theory of language
• Compatible with Habermasian theories of language
• Study of language embedded in some European approaches
  • But generalizable beyond...

One articulation of the rules (there are variations in different books):

• Parties must not prevent each other from advancing standpoints or casting doubt on standpoints.
• A party that advances a standpoint is obliged to defend it if the other party asks him to do so.
• A party's attack on a standpoint must relate to the standpoint that has indeed been advanced by the other party.
• A party may defend his standpoint only by advancing argumentation relating to that standpoint.
• A party may not falsely present something as a premise that has been left unexpressed by the other party or deny a premise that he himself has left implicit.
• A party may not falsely present a premise as an accepted starting point nor deny a premise representing an accepted starting point.
• A party may not regard a standpoint as conclusively defended if the defense does not take place by means of an appropriate argumentation scheme that is correctly applied.
• In his argumentation, a party may only use arguments that are logically valid or capable of being validated by making explicit one or more unexpressed premises.
• A failed defense of a standpoint must result in the party that put forward the standpoint retracting it, and a conclusive defense of the standpoint must result in the other party retracting his doubt about the standpoint.
• A party must not use formulations that are insufficiently clear or confusingly ambiguous and he must interpret the other party's formulations as carefully and accurately as possible

To have a powerful institution, you need self-correcting communicative practices

• If you corrupt the practices, you will fragment the institution; confidence crisis, legitimation contest

e.g. drug advertising example of institutional power relations

Institutional practice supported by pragmatics

Pragma-dialectics took a turn toward practice

• Post-Bordieu idea of practice

Problem with pragmatics

• Social change occurs, all based on contingency
• Contingency develops one step at a time
• Someone can find an angle where an object starts to unravel all the little contingent relationships of power
  • Whole apparatus is broken and needs to be redone

Don't know where uncertainty is located until it is identified

• Pragmatics can uncover these and unravel large interactions

Conversational analysis

Compatible with Pragmatics

• Pragmatics attends to the rules (grammars)
• CA reflects symbolic interaction
  • Communication as a social practice, social engagement

Self and society

Erving Goffman

• Symbolic interaction
• Humans interpret each others actions and react to those interpretations. (Blumer, 180)
• Actions have a surplus of meaning
• Read actions not as behavior but as gesture with meaning

Harold Garfinkle

• Leads to ethnomethodology, ethnography

Both compatible with anthropological view

• Linguistic acts make meaning in social context
• Look at social processes where this occurs

Very different from:

• Language as artifact of material interactions
• Language as distortions of concepts

Heart of symbolic interaction:

• Chicago
• UCLA
• An American view of communication
  • Institutions are places where communication is made, in practice

Conversation analysis

Drawing from symbolic interaction and ethnomethodology

Analysis of "the formal procedures that are used by members in accomplishing everyday social actions" (Psathas, 15)

• Interactions are "concrete, actual instances of mundance occurances" (Psathas, 15)

How does communication produce the mundane, comfortable that we inhabit?

When people have a conversation, they know what they're doing

Core assumptions:

• Claims must be made on the basis of what matters to and is oritned to participants
• Claims must be grounded in empirical data and proved through rigorous analysis on a case by case basis
• Context must be relevantly oriented to based on adjacency
• Interaction is orderly

Sacks, suicide prevention

Data source: tape recordings from Suicide Prevention Center in LA

• Seeking conversational structures
• Everyday stress

Did not account for mediation (talking on the phone)

• But did make note of vocal performance (pauses, stress, emphasis, pauses)
  • Set of codes in transcription

Conversational pairs

Conversational pairs are sequential units Units can be examined to see how they are organized and understand what they accomplish

Conversational pairs are undertaken by turn taking. Turn taking creates a slot for response, which may be supplied in the manner expected or not.

• A performed utterance may be taken in multiple ways depending upon the participant.

Saying something is a "gambit" until a counter-reply is given

• Meaning isn't in the words and how they are structured
• Meaning is a collaborative outcome
• Exchange

Ambiguity

• Challenging in pragmatics, you want to reach conclusions, judgements
• Strength in conversation, enables one to say something not-yet-formed or something difficult to articulate

Context of a suicide prevention hotline is more constraining

Summons-Answer Sequence

• Two turns in length
• First speaker produces the first part
• Second speaker produces the 2nd
• They occur at the beginning of interaction seq
• They are non terminal in that they do not end encounters
• The speaker who speaks 1st summons + is obliged to speak again
• The answerer of the summons is obliged to listen
• Phone calls are not repeatable once an answer occurs
• Phone calls may be repeated if not answered
• Phone calls are verbal but may also include gestures

How do conventions of turn-taking shift?

Conversation styles:

• Density? Speed?
• Thinking out loud? Preparatory, deliberative
• Rhythm, flow

Phone booth suggests expectation of privacy

• But mobile phones suggest otherwise

New media

• How are norms established, negotiated?

Some shared pairs

• Greeting-return greeting
• Question answer
• Closings
• Invitation-accept/decline
• Offer-accept/decline
• Complaint-apology/justification

1. Recognition: A necessary pair

Who is this?

• Kevin
• Your oldest son
• Your worst nightmare

Recognitions are...

• Often openers, subtext may create multiple openings
• Bounded, graded
• Given with 'least possible' effort
• Matches self-reference to inspectables offered and/or observed
• Trouble or failure of recognition warrant repair
• Taken for granted requests for recognition may be untroubling or made problematic

Once recognized, exchange proceeds...

= 2. Signaling turns: An organizing pair

Re: Bailey, The tactical uses of passion

• How is turn-taking managed in a committee?
• Very useful ideas on group communication

Socially-habituated processes

• Can be formally seen and analyzed

Three tyes of groups:

Elite committee

• Turn taking based on centrality of identity to issue
• We recognize one another as members of a family/fraternity/chosen/select group
• We take turns because we are peers
• Are "you" really one of "us"?
• Mutual stroking
• How do you get new ppl to the center?

Democratic committee

• Turn-taking seized for attention
• Negotiation of blame, reward
• Hurly-burly circus
• Highly politicized, everything has huge symbolic meaning
• Can't get outside of having to speak up

Task committee

• Turn-taking based upon expertise as information is exchanged, organized and put to use
• Limited time frame
• Accountable for a product
• Incentive to behave rationally
• Punishment for bad communication: having to meet longer

3. Complement: an ambivalent pair

• Complement is given
• Complement may either affirm or reject
  • May downgrade assertion
• Adjustment of overstatement by understatement
• Goffman: remedial work to restore order by dealing ritually with transgression

Pragmatics: Speech act that is relevant, justified, acceptable and sincere. Complement is not flattery but it borders closely.

Flattery

http://thedarjeelingexpress.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/eddie-haskell-played-by-ken-osmond.jpg?w=800&h=640

• Blandishment for the purposes of building positive affiliation
• Overstatement in ways designed to lower guard against weak claims
• Statement with a positive tone and affiliative results
• Flattery echos and freezes a figure into self-admiration or doubt
• Flattery inhibits conversational exchange - strategic, mimetic, or mocking

Problematic in a democratic society

• Pandering is rampant

Adjacency Pairs

• They are (at least) 2 turns in length
• (At least) 2 parts
• First is uttered by speakr
• Second uttered by listener
• Turn taking follows with immediacy
• Order is second relative to first pair part in positioning (Assertion and response)
• Discriminatively ordered as the first sets context for second
• Exchange creates conditional relevance based on counters

How does dispreferred term not disrupt conversation?

Exended conversation

Directions are shown to be collaboratively produced as the recipient is actively involved in listening, showing understandings, giving acknowledgements to the other, and so on (23)

• Response is invited unless conversation slips into monologue

• Directions verbal/nonverbal assumed to be consistent. Inconsistency is puzzling.

Directions

• Sequentially organized
• Requested and provided Huh?
• Designed for recipient
• Next turns follow request
• Binary-affirmation then continue negation then circle back
• Arrival is proposed. Go on?
• Marked ending followed by: acknowledgement, confirmation, promise to do better

Part of the ethnography that you do is to read language in its performance as cues

• Social relationship that is cooperatively owned and at risk

Story telling

Stories have a place defined by the conversation

• Storytellers will justify the story as a departure from the conversation and then return at the end to find a relevance of the story to the conversation

e.g. Hannah Storm + Ron Artest

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCUF9y6JX7c
• Ron Ron goes off into a tangent and then Storm brings it back
• Best contextualizing of a story that GTG has ever seen

See also: (Schenkein 1978, 219)

Conversation and media

What behaviors now serve the functions of turn-taking, self-organizing, directions and pairing?

e.g. threads re: "I hate Netflix" on FB

• Shifting 'natural behavior' to platform positioned pairs. Conversational form inviting participatory intervention

What kinds of questions can be asked here?

Conversational spaces are like genre

• Except that where genre is planned, these are seized

Jump offs

Herbert Blumer

Harvey Sacks

Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson

F.G. Bailey, The Tactical Uses of Passion: An essay on power, reason & reality

July 19 Content analysis

Risks:

• Makes claims to objectivity via measurement
  • e.g. concordance measures number of terms within a text

Compare producers within the overall discourse

• All newspapers : All TV
• Within newspapers { this paper : that paper }
• Within one paper { this author : that author }

One goal:

• Mapping

Synchronic:

• Not as interested in change over time
• Want to see all the different parts, conduits in production, commentary/reception

Diachronic:

• How does content change over time
• Looking at conceptual categories

Reflexivity, critique is sacrificed for objectivity

• Realistic view: language stands for concepts

CA

• Fuels Communication as an industry
• Lots of software
• Gives social science a point of entry
• But view of language is "suspect"

HOWTOs:

• LPS: CA using Google Docs
• GTG: Qualitative content analysis
  • Constructing an object of inquiry and reading it
  • In the past, there was a canon - challenge was finding something new to say
  • Now, what counts as speech worthy of study is vast - more important: "practices of influence" that exist (and may exist!)

Content analysis

• Definition: "a method for summarizing any form of content by counting various aspects of the content"
• Value: "a more objective point of view that removes subjectivity from summaries and "simplifies detection of trends"

Claim to objectivity is a lever?

Don't see the same text exactly twice

• Hard to see when trends do change

Media content

Examples:

• Print
• Display
• Broadcast
• Recordings
• Live situations
• Observations

Frames

• What is the frame?
• What does it do?
• Can you code it?

Find something that is being done by the communication

• That is being repeated and is characteristic of a corpus of communications that fall into the same type or same category

Audience content

Content analysis doesn't only look at media and media themes

• Can also be used when assembling responses

Examples:

• Interview transcripts
• Group discussions
• Open-ended questions in surveys
• Letters to the editor
• Listeners/call-ins to radio
• Petitions
• Signed documents
• Display

Stochastic approach to audience study

• You shoot an arrow at a target
• Measure how far off you were
• Adjust, take aim again
• Fire
• Repeat

Participatory culture

Available evidence doesn't fall neatly into 1950s categories

• Internet cultures are mediated spaces with content
• Content is themed by keyword search
• Content is displayed in mixed-media, hyperlinked form
• Content is both owner and audience produced through interactive participation
• Content is measured by hits, links, and moves
• Content is networked across site clusters

Six steps of CA

Adapted from a website...

1. Why do an analysis?

• The analysis offers insight into the variation of a 'message' and the size of an audience
• The analysis offers analysis of the means to influence attention and behavioral response
  • Goals are market-oriented: sell products
  • Goals are social-oriented: violence/obesity
• Content analysis measures thematic change over time. Such work explains change
• Content analysis specifies representation of a discourse formation of an institution

You may be able to map discourse and social change

• e.g. "Carmageddon" and getting people to stay home. What will they do next time?

Traces of public concern and incidents remain but are bounded

2. Sample a corpus

• A corpus is a "body of information" out of which a "representative sample" must be drawn
• A corpus may be given and exhaustive - such as exchange of opinions in the transcript of a debate
• A corpus may be constructed and open - such as exchange of opinions in national debates - including politicians, the press, and interest groups

Not about how many samples: but which samples do we choose to work from?

e.g. Congressional debates, "dreadful affairs"

• GTG goes to the Congressional Record, downloads debates - seeking key terms of address
• Depending on rules of decorum, and looking for breeches of decorum
• Record may reflect discourse but may also be "talking points dumped in"

Finite info doesn't allow you to extrapolate broadly

• Less freedom to draw in whatever you like

Corpus is not finite. It is large and on-going.

• It is the "population."

How do you move from human coding to machine coding?

• Build a code book as a human, run it with the machine and see if you get the same thing
• Can you move from human to machine coding reliably?
• If so, you can do 1000 human coding and then run 10000 on machines

3. Units of content

• Units are basit items for counting in order to achieve measurement
• Generally a ratio large unit/small number of observations. Small unit/greater number...
  • Typically: unit in content analysis is a single newspaper article
  • Larger units (books) will be difficult to judge, arrive at consensus upon, more ambiguous
• Units include:
  • Word or phrase
  • A conversational turn or paragraph
  • An article or newscast
  • A large document or show
• Units may fit into categories such as:
  • Articles by source
  • Shows by network
  • Magazines by status

For audience content:

• Open-ended questionnaires
• Statements produced by consensus groups
• Comments from in-depth interviews or group discussions

4. Preparing for coding

Written texts are assembled from sampled sources:

• Scan print with OCR software. HTML files need conversion to text files.

Transcription selections from recordings:

• Full transcription is expensive and slow
• Sample transcripts identifies key moments

Transcription converts messages into words

Live coding requires training and perhaps joint participation in the interpretative tasks

• More than one coder helps to normalize, standardize
• For recordable media performances, helpful to capture meaningful frames

Interviews are very, very time consuming to conduct and transcribe

• Need to factor this into the plan
• Good practice to number lines so that they can be quickly retrieved
• Important because interviews provide data that are not otherwise obtainable
  • Talk

Essentially data transformation

5. Coding content

• Coding in content analysis is the same as coding answers in a survey: summarizing responses into groups, reducing the number of different responses to make comparisons easier"
• A coding frame is just a set of groups into which comments (or answers to a question) can be divided. Categories should identify artifacts as grounded in general groups: Who, What, Why, When, Where, How and divisions across

Coding consistency

• Have a detailed list showing each code and the reasons for choosing it
• Using the minimum number of people to do the coding
• Keep a record of each borderline decision and reasons for choosing
• Have each code re-code some of each other's word. 10% sample usually enough.
• Go straight to coding without transcription when you are looking for events within a live performance. Make a questionnaire to direct what coders are looking for

Coding is based on training

• You don't read every text yourself
• Success depends on a clear code that people are trained to consistently recognize

e.g. Questions regarding oil spill news on TV

• How long did coverage last?
• What was the program?
• On what channel, what date, and at what time?

6.

GTG's practical suggestions for qualitative CA

How do I put together what it is I need to study?

Primary task:

• Assembling texts
• Creating a world to study

Strategies to use:

Text as hobby, creating a discourse formation

• Figure out how to collect texts that are part of a movement or a practice
  • Movements have goals in mind, will create textual campaigns or strategies
    • Sometimes one issue, sometimes multiple issues
• Collect from multiple points of view: politics, film, criticism
• Part-counterpart
  • HEAVY: something that matters; "biopolitics"
  • LIGHT: something that interests you; "cruise ship disasters"
• PAIS (see below)

How do you understand the context in which a policy or debate plays out?

• Congressional hearings are a good entry point to a debate, discourse

Casework fell under classification

• Need to find secondary literature and use it as a method to find what it is you're going to choose

Nowadays (Thanks to Deleuze & Guattari), a case is part of a trajectory of self-duplicating cases that are unsettling our knowledge

• What was Thelma and Louise to the feminist movement

Start with a "simple case"

• Identifiable
• Recognizable

Looking at the impact of speech?

• Figure out how to write up the text of the speech so that it's interesting and describes what is contained in the speech
• Next, look at commentary leading up to and following the speech

LPS - "job killer"

9 month research project inquiring after the phrase "job killer" (and related variations)

• Wanted to know how the term has been used over time

Using wildcards and boolean operators with Lexis-Nexis search

• Some more complex functions:
  • atleastn(word); "atleast20(evil)"
  • w/n, "political capital w/20 Obama"

Lots of work identifying false positives and refining query to eliminate them

• Very difficult to have 0 false positives but important to minimize them

Investigative

• Fewer hypotheses at the start
• Many variables coded for weren't that useful in the end

Challenges for training coders

• Things needed to be VERY clear
• Some trouble with certain values made them unreliable

Good idea for the designer of the study to NOT be the one that actually performs the coding

• Better to have multiple people using the same coding scheme
• You can make a stronger claim that your coding scheme isn't arbitrary and is replicable
  • Possible to use another person even as a reliability measure (doing 10% of the coding)

Usefulness of Gdocs

• Letting many coders enter information into the same spreadsheet
• Coordinated meetings with people coding together, talking through the process/thinking

Intercoder reliability using Pearson

Also, gdocs graphical summary

• Don't need to go into SPSS

Key issue is transformation:

• Needed to convert categorical values ("Wall Street Journal") into numerical with table for SPSS
  • Could have been accomplished with a Python/Perl script?

Crosstabs in SPSS were particularly useful

Why GDocs instead of Atlas/ti and Dedoose?

• This is similar but simpler than dedoose

Jump offs

Diction (software)

TextQuest

• Coding large text files
• Search with patterns
• Machine may suggest other related terms
• Leading toward cluster of patterns, code

Vanderbilt news archive

• They prepare tapes for given periods of time

Public Affairs Information Service (PAIS)

• Public policy, theories of Poli Sci

Written for Washington audiences, align the issues, responses to event

• National Journal
• Congressional Quarterly

Respository for public hearings

• CSPAN
• Hear live public discourse, issues of public debate