Search

"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]

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]

This paper uses Conversation Analysis to investigate the ways in which participants in an online asynchronous postgraduate reading group managed and negotiated their contributions within the discussion. Using the conversation analytic concerns with sequential organisation, adjacency pairs and topicality, this article shows the analytic insights that this perspective can bring to the examination of written asynchronous discourse. The paper shows that in the section of the discussion analysed here, the discourse displayed remarkable similarities to the ways in which face-to-face conversation has been seen to operate in terms of the organisation of conversational turns, the application of specific interactional rights, the lineal development of topics of conversation and the structural use of question-answer turn pairs. The paper concludes by showing how this form of analysis can relate to the formation of reflexive pedagogy in which course design can be created to take account of such findings. It shows how a detailed understanding of how pedagogy is played out in interaction is fundamental for reflecting on the relationship between pedagogic aims and educational practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the structure of topic movement within face‐to‐face postgraduate university seminar discussion forums through a conversation analytic approach. The analysis of 12 audio recordings of seminars showed that in spite of clear differences in the management style of sessions by seminar leaders there were important consistencies in their normative structure of participation. Previous research has shown that the turn‐taking procedures used as a basic organisational feature of the talk have been seen to result in a regular change of topic within seminars. Although the research here supports these findings, the data showed that topic change was only one aspect of the topic negotiation process. The analysis in this article illustrates that topic negotiation was an ever‐present feature of the talk and that, in addition to frequent ‘successful’ changes of topic, there were also innumerable ‘unsuccessful’ topical interjections. One prominent source of such failure was the presence of overlap in the seminar talk. In addition to being of value to educationalists wishing to understand educational processes, this analysis is viewed as having significant relevance for the development of alternative distributed media for hosting interactive seminars as it shows the implications of the interactional ‘affordances’ of learning environments for the achievement of interactive talk. This article suggests, therefore, that research and development in this field would benefit from detailed studies of the affordances of these alternative hosting media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]