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"Analysing Digital Interaction" is a book that explores the study of online communication and interaction. The editors highlight the importance of understanding the details of interaction in order to comprehend the changing nature of contemporary society. The book showcases microanalytic methods from conversation analysis, membership category analysis, and discursive psychology to analyze the digital nature of interaction and how it is impacted by being online. The chapters address key methodological issues, such as research ethics and the complexities of online contexts, and demonstrate the performative nature of textual actions and the management of affordances in mediated interaction. The book provides valuable insights into the rapidly evolving forms of life in the digital age. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the use of fiction as a mode of representing data in social research. I show that three of the key drivers for fictionalising research accounts relate to the ambitions of aesthetic engagement, verisimilitude and user engagement. I look at the different ways that authors have attempted to achieve these ambitions and the methodological tensions that arise from them. I show that contemporary evaluative criteria in qualitative inquiry helps us to understand that fictional reporting is an important tool for researchers in creating more affective writing. However, there are divergences in how researchers conceive of and use fictional accounts, which highlight the importance of continued debate about the methodological practices of its use. In order to contribute to these debates I point to three areas that need particular consideration for researchers working in this area: (1) the structures of academic publishing and their embodiment in university audit regimes; (2) the absence of engagement with alternative forms of writing in academic professional development and training; and (3) the substantial ethical dilemmas in the use of fictional accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction, we provide the scholarly background that motivates the special issue and briefly discuss its content. We touch on contemporary debates in symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, and anthropology that inform the research undertaken by the contributors. We conclude by deriving six interrelated themes—intersection, entwinement, multimodal, contextually embedded, structured, and serendipitous—from an examination of the articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article it is argued that the growing field of the sociology of the senses has had a strong methodological focus on people's accounts of their sensorial experiences at the expense of studying the practical achievement of sense work as an interactional phenomenon. Recent work has called for more innovative methods in sensorial scholarship and the use of creative approaches to explore the senses. While applauding this move, in this article the authors show the importance of a focus on micro-behavioural actions in studying the senses. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, they analyse video recordings of near vision tests in optometry consultations illustrating the highly routinised, but also the embodied and improvised character of the actions through which the vision is made available for scrutiny. They argue that sensorial scholarship has sidelined the study of social context as a lived-order and demonstrate the importance of treating sensorial actions as routinised, embodied and improvisatory. The authors agree that using more creative methods would be valuable but caution against relying exclusively on methods that do not sufficiently contextualise the senses as a lived and practical social accomplishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of transcripts in the analysis of social action. Drawing on a study of the interactional processes in optometry consultations, we show how our interest in the rhythm of reading letters from a chart arose serendipitously from our orientation to transcription conventions. We discuss our development of alternative transcription systems, and the affordances of each. We relate this example to constructivist debates in the area of transcription and argue that the issues have been largely characterised in political terms at the expense of a focus on the actual processes of transcription. We show here that analytic affordances emerge through an orientation to professional conventions. The article ends by suggesting that a close reflection on the design of transcripts and on transcription innovation can lead to more nuanced analysis as it puts the researcher in dialogue with the taken for granted ideas embedded in a system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]