Content area
Abstract
This thesis is a methodological inquiry into the analytical methods of ethnomethodological studies of real-time interaction in light of the latest data technology available. The inquiry comprises theoretical discussion and empirical investigation. The theoretical discussion explores the modern relevancy of Garfinkel’s(1948) praxeology in terms of the video analysis of the aspects of time and space in real-time interaction. Reviewing Garfinkel’s concept of action in 1948 and the accompanying model of actor, the discussion points to an alternative concept of action that represents the retrospective unities in participants’ shared horizon of here-and- now perception, which are prospectively relevant for their judgement of actions in the flow of real-time interaction. This thesis uses ‘projection’ to label the alternative concept of action discussed above to highlight its retrospective-prospective structure. It adopts ‘projection’ as its basic analytical unit to develop a form of analysis to unpack the sophistication of participants’ multi-sensory experience in real-time interaction from the rich multi-modality of video data.
The empirical investigation analyses the training interaction from a multi-angle synchronised video collected from a life-skill training workshop at the university. The rich multi-modality of the multi-angle data is represented innovatively by a horizontally-organised time-line transcription to represent the highly co-ordinated temporality of the participants’ work. Through three chapters of analysis, the study explicated a layered picture of the training event. The multi-layered organisation not only reflexively constituted the sufficient senses of words, gestures, utterances, and activities produced by the training participants, but also comprised the sophisticated reality structure in role-playing that gave the participants an educational simulation experience. The analysis shows that the training participants co-ordinately bracketed the role-players spatially and temporally so that the role-players’ acts in the bracketed time-space were perceived as simulative and accenting a simulative world. This form of analysis has the potential to be developed into a discipline of methods for social sciences that dynamically evolves by recruiting methods applicable for studying human sociality from a Garfinkelian perspective. Named after its basic analytical unit, this discipline of methods can justly be called Project Analysis.
