Conversation analysis of cultural models

Question on the transcription symbol

I found a really good page for the transcription symbols we are using.

It has a better explanation of the = symbol. It says that the = symbol "'Equals’ signs mark the immediate ‘latching’ of successive talk, whether of one or more speakers, with no interval". I think that this means if I were to follow up what someone said with no pause then we would use the = to show that there was no pause.

Transcription Software

Here is the transcription software that Jason found.

http://www.nch.com.au/scribe/

Thanks Jason

Project 4 Advice

Here are some words of advice from professor Hutchins on the upcoming project:

It is NOT necessary to repeat project 3 to do project 4 or any of the following projects. I have found through experience that following through on project 3 is an easy way to get a good interview. However, sometimes that does not work out. I have also had great interviews done with people who had nothing to do with the student's proj 3. One student interviewed her grandmother about grandma's experiences during WWII. That turned out to be a great interview filled with interesting cultural models.

I hope this is helpful, if you are still confused doing the reading should help and we will also go over this project in discussion.

Advice on Photo Format

If you aren't going to add marking, highlighting and inscriptions to the photos then you could just staple them to the back. If you plan on adding any marks to the images (which I strongly suggest doing) add those as separate illustration. They can be a regular low resolution printouts in the document, then include the photos separately stapled to the back. The main point is that you make it easy for us to see the phenomenon that you are explaining, so reference the photos in the way that makes this process most efficient.

Try to turn in some that are good quality prints. They don't need to be from a photo studio or on high gloss paper, but make sure they show the subject in good detail.

Myers, “Molecular Embodiments”

the objects of molecular biology are becoming tangible and workable in new ways. With this shift from reading and writing one-dimensional genetic codes to modeling and interpreting the functions of three-dimensional and temporally dynamic protein molecules come new practical and conceptual hurdles for researchers and their students.
Moving Past Latour?
Emoboyment of knowledge
“Diane carries more than a ‘mental image’ of what a molecule should look like in her head: seeing, feeling, and moving with the chemical constraints of the molecule, she has embodied molecular forms”
Thick description (Geertz, 1973)
“requires attending to the corporeal and affective entanglements of researchers with available concepts and modeling media, and with the visualization machinery they entrain on living substances.”

Photolab Ethnography

Project 3 Pictures

I narrowed it down to these four pictures, I was hoping for a bit of help in deciding which ones? They're kind of big, so I shrunk them down. Click on them to see the full-size versions.

Here are some of the
pictures I took for Project three. Hopefully we can analyze these in class and see what people find.

How a Cockpit Remembers its Speeds (Hutchins)

Key Words and Definitions

• Classical Theory has given us very powerful models of the information processing properties of individual human agents.

  • Asking a set of questions to analyze the mental processes which organized the behavior of the individual

  • How representations are transformed, combined, and propagated through the system

• Hutchins says, you can apply this to a unit of analysis that is larger than an individual person.

I. Representations in the Memory System and Their Properties

1. Flaps and Stats

   1. Function: Change the shape and area of the wing, which affects the speed of the plane.

   2. Properties: Malleable

2. The Spoken Representation

   1. Function: Transmits the information from the ASI (airspeed indicator) to the pilots

   2. Properties: Endures only during its production, temporal.

3. The Speed Card

   1. Function: Contains the weight interval with the appropriate speeds permanently printed on the card.

   2. Properties: Semi permanent.

4. Speed Bugs

   1. Function: Indicates the desired speed on approach given an amount of fuel.

   2. Properties: Attributes meaning to visual areas of the speed dials, enables cognitive distribution

5. Salmon Bug

   1. Function: Provides the pilots an indication of how well the plane is tracking the speed target.

   2. Properties: Physical, dynamic.

6. Airspeed Indicator Instrument (ASI)

   1. Function: Displays the speed of the plane

   2. Properties: Dynamic, physical.

7. Fuel Quantity Panel

   1. Function: Displays the amount of fuel the plane contains

   2. Properties: Dynamic, physical.

II. Additional Key Concepts

1. Situated Seeing

2. Distribution of cognitive labor

3. Robustness through redundant processing

4. Control through propagation of representational state

5. Memory in a socio-technical system

6. Amortization of complexity

7. Three different descriptions of the memory process

   1. Procedural (the sort of description a pilot might provide)

   2. Second and third descriptions are cognitive in that they concern representations and processes that transform those representations.

The Dialectic of Arithmetic in Grocery Shopping

Key Words and Definitions

1. Dialectic: The art or practice of logical discussion as employed in investigating the truth of a theory or opinion.

2. Arithmetic Problem Solving:

• Basically, the past experiences and beliefs of the problem solver and what the individual is doing, what should happen in the course of doing it, and what the setting is in which it is taking place.

• Shaped by the broader activity in which it occurs

• What are the general characteristics of problem solving when something happens in the course of shopping that appears problematic to the shopper? And how does the character of problem solving within grocery shopping specifically affect the nature of arithmetic activity?

1. The integral nature of activity in relation with contexts

2. Mutual interdependence of mental and physical activity

3. Arena: A physically, economically, politically, and socially organized space-in-time. It is outside of, yet encompasses the individual, providing a higher-order institutional framework within which the setting is organized. Not context dependent!

4. Setting: A repeatedly ordered and edited version of the arena. Not simply a mental map of the individual, but also has an independent, physical character and a potential for realization only in activity.

• Barker says, the environment is seen to consist of highly structured, improbable arrangement of objects and events which coerce behavior in accordance with their own dynamic patterning. The environment dictates a certain type of behavior, and that the environment sets a behavior setting, called synomorphy (rules of the game). Activity is reduced to a passive response to the setting.

• Lave says, settings are not an objective phenomenon. Experienced differently by individual.

5. Activity: Dialectically constituted with the setting (is generated out of, and generates, the setting).

• They don’t exist in realized form except in relation to each other

6. Rationalization: Maintaining the contradiction between choice and the necessity of choosing. It structures the arithmetic activity.

• In the shopping context, it is a routine, and the shopper is faced with an abundant amount of choices. This routine and contradictory quality of the routine choices, and the dialectical form of activity in setting, together shape the rationalizing character of arithmetic calculation in the supermarket.

7. Gap-Closing: A dialectical movement between the expected shape of the solution and the information between the expected shape of the solution and the information and calculation devices at hand, all in pursuit of a solution that is germane to the activity that gave it shape to the first place.

• The solution shape is generated out of the decision process up to an interruption or snag. The act of identifying a problem changes the salience of setting characteristics.

• Eg: When I am working in the kitchen, and realize that I don’t have a pot. What will I do instead? How do I work around this problem?

• An ongoing process of comparing the current state of knowledge of the problem and the current definition of the solution.

Neisser - Memory: What are the Important Questions?

• Laboratory procedures obscure real characteristics of memory.

• Psychologists are not interested in such questions primarily because they believe they are doing something more important. They are working toward a general theory of memory, a scientific understanding of its underlying mechanisms, more fundamental and far-reaching than any research on worldly questions could possibly be. (3)

• If X is an interesting or socially significant aspect of memory, then psychologists have hardly ever studied X. (2)

Ethology: Study of animals/organisms in their natural environments.

Ethnography: A branch of anthropology dealing with the scientific description of individual cultures

Quote: “I’ve never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don’t understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.” –Sophia Loren (Italian film Actress, 1934)

Different types of past memories:

1. Everyone uses the past to define themselves (6)

2. Past experiences are recalled in search of self-improvement (7)

3. Personal memories achieve a kind of public importance (7): legal testimonies, eyewitnesses

4. Remembering events secondhand (that of friends, etc.)

Visualization and Cognition (Latour)

Key Words and Definitions

• There is a “grand dichotomy” between prescientific and scientific cultures, which should be replaced with uncertain and unexpected divides.

  • This dichotomy is merely a border but not any natural boundary, but are maintained to prevent absurd consequences of relativism

  • Changes in the capitalistic mode of production, dubbed “materialist”, explain the ways which we prove, argue and believe things.

  • The only way to escape simplistic relativist position is to look at explanations that take writing and imaging into account – also known as inscriptions!

1. Agonistic: The overcoming of an argument.

2. Inscriptions: writing and images which help make agonistic situations more favorable. The following traits should not be isolated from one another:

1. Mobile: They can move around. (eg: maps, diagrams, Petri dishes)

2. Immutable: When they move around, they are kept in their state.

3. Flat: There is nothing hidden or convoluted (eg: a diagram, chart, graph)

4. Modifiable scales: Can be reconstructed in size without changing its internal proportions.

5. Reproducible: Spread at little cost.

6. Recombinable: Since they are mobile, flat, reproducible, and variable, this is made possible.

7. Superimposable: Multiple images can be recombined of different scales and origins. (think of Google maps)

8. Able to be made part of a written text

9. Able to be merged with geometry: You cannot measure the sun, but you can measure a photograph of the sun with a ruler.

3. Optical Consistency: No matter from what distance and angle an object is seen, it is always possible to transfer it – to translate it – and to obtain the same object at a different size as seen from another position.

   1. Why is this important? Because it establishes what is called a “linear perspective framework”, where you can allow perspectives to move through space and return where it came from.

   2. It allows the shift of senses to vision in an agonistic situation (you can look at a map and determine certain things about it, although you can’t smell or touch it, but the absent things are now being able to be discussed.)

4. Visual Culture: How a culture sees the world and makes it visible.

   1. These visual cultures are not supposed to be “objective”, but rather, have optical consistency.

   2. Sort of like Professional Vision (Goodwin)

Professional Vision (Goodwin)

Key Words and Definitions

1. Discursive Practices: Used by members of a profession to shape events in the domains subject to their professional scrutiny. Includes coding schemes, highlighting, and graphical representations.

1. Coding Scheme: Transforms the world into the categories and events that are relevant to the work of the profession.

   1. Making a classification of something (eg: Putting a section of clothes as t-shirts, another as sweaters).

2. Highlighting: Dividing a domain of scrutiny into a figure and a ground so that events relevant to the activity of the moment stand out.

   1. Ways of shaping now only one’s own perception but also that of others. (eg: This paper)

3. Graphical Representations: External representations of distinctive characteristics of the material world to organize phenomena.

4. Basically, the process of how professional vision comes to be.

5. This includes the theories, artifacts, and bodies of expertise that distinguish it from other professions.

2. Domain of Scrutiny: An area of interest in the context of the work practices.

3. Object of Knowledge: Emerges through the interplay between a domain of scrutiny and a set of discursive practices.

4. Contested Vision: Perceptions that are not treated as idiosyncratic phenomena but as socially organized perceptual frameworks shared within the police profession.

   1. Example given in class about Rodney King. Police have a certain view at which they can convince others during trial that what they did was professionally appropriate.