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A highly important societal aspect of language use are pragmatic creative acts and interactions. The ability to, through multimodal interaction, create something new, is primordial for human sociality. In this paper, I propose a theoretical model that enables detailed analysis of situated co-operative creative actions as these naturally emerge in interactional situations. First, I develop the theoretical model by extrapolating from Charles Goodwin’s theory of co-operative action. I then illustrate the model through detailed analysis of a single case where participants interact in a video-mediated robotic context. The model is situated within ethnomethodological multimodal conversation analysis and based on video ethnographic data. This research contributes to the field of creativity and human pragmatic action by providing an applicable model for Situated Co-Operative Creativity, the SCOC model, which can be used for detailed analysis of everyday creativity.

Guide dogs are sense-able agents that can assist Visually Impaired Persons (VIP) to achieve mobility. But could a guide dog be replaced by a robot dog? Based on video recordings and ethnomethodological ‘conversation analysis’ of VIPs who are mobile in a street environment with a remotely operated robodog or a guide dog, respectively, this paper shows the multisensory and semiotic capacities of non-human agents as assistants in navigational activities. It also highlights the differences between their type of agency and sense-ability, and thus their different roles in situations of assisted mobility and disability mobility. This paper contributes to research in assisted and disability mobility between humans and non-humans by showing how they work not as individual agents, but as ‘VIP + guide dog’ and ‘VIP + robodog + operator’ assemblages, and by demonstrating that these assemblages distribute and co-construct the practical perception of the material world which is necessary for accomplishing mobility.

In this paper, we introduce the concept of phygital highlighting. Phygital actions, by their very nature, are intertwined, simultaneously produced both physically and digitally, and may be used for practices of highlighting. The aim of this paper is therefore to revisit Goodwin's (1994) concept of highlighting and expand it to include phygital actions. We show how phygital highlighting is a participant method for achieving joint attention while engaged in face-to-face, computer-supported cooperative activity. Phygital highlighting is shown to be an observable and socially recognisable practice, composed of multimodal resources, specifically related to pointing practices and indexical terms in combination with moving the mouse and cursor, all of which are used to achieve a shared reference to specific parts of the displayed content. The paper is based on video ethnography and multimodal conversation analysis of a single case from an open office environment, which is considered a perspicuous setting for research into phygital highlighting.

This article explores how visually impaired people (VIP) navigate around (a) stationary people and (b) moving people, when guided by the Boston Dynamics’ robotic “dog” and its human operator. By focusing on the micro-spatial dimensions of human mobility while being guided by a mobile robot, the paper argues that the VIP+robodog+operator is in situ emerging as a socio-material assemblage in which agency, perception, and trust gets distributed and that this distribution enables the accomplishment of navigation. The article is based on ethnomethodology and multimodal conversation analysis (EMCA) and a video ethnographic methodology. It contributes to studies in perception, agency, human–robot interaction, space and culture, and distributed co-operative action in socio-material settings.

Face-to-face interaction is a primordial site for human activity and intersubjectivity. Empirical studies have shown how people reflexively exhibit a face orientation and work to establish a formation in which everyone is facing each other in local participation frameworks. The Face has also been described by, e.g., Levinas as the basis for a first ethical philosophy. Humans have established these Face-formations when interacting since time immemorial, but what happens when one of the participants is present through a telepresence robot? Based on ethnomethodology, Peircean/Goodwinian semiotics, multimodal conversation analysis and video data from a Danish residential rehabilitation center, the article shows the ways in which participants manage to interactively, cooperatively, and moment by moment achieve an F-formation in situ. The article contributes a detailed analysis and discussion of the kind of participant a telepresence robot is, in and through situated interactions: I propose that we term this participant the RoboDoc, given that it is an assemblage of a doctor who controls a robot. By focusing on the affordances of mobility, the article contributes to a renewed understanding of the importance and relevance of establishing Face-orientations in an increasingly technofied telepresence world.

Various forms of service work rely upon personnel undertaking activities that necessitate close, and in some cases potentially intimate, contact with a client’s body. In this paper, we consider the ways in which opticians place and position glasses on the head of their clients and how they avoid, or at least ameliorate, the problems and sensitivities that might arise in this close encounter with the co-participant. The paper is based on the analysis of a substantial corpus of video-recordings, augmented by field work, undertaken both in UK and Denmark. The analysis draws on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis and contributes to our understanding of the interactional accomplishment of body work and embodied conduct and to the growing corpus of research concerned with ‘multimodality’ and the social organisation of service encounters.

We explore how the smartphone app SeeingAI can be used by visually impaired people (VIPs) when going shopping. Based on video recordings and ethnomethodological conversation analysis, we contribute insights to the everyday use of computer vision technology and natural language technology (NLP) ‘in the wild’.

Vi præsenterer i denne artikel en systematisk diskussion af, hvad multimodalitet er, samt hvordan multimodale interaktionsanalyser kan udføres ud fra et etnometodologisk og konversationsanalytisk (EMCA) perspektiv. Vi introducerer til de grundlæggende metodologiske antagelser og viser igennem tre eksemplariske analyser, hvilke temaer, problemstillinger og undersøgelsesområder analytikere kan fokusere på, hvordan de i praksis kan udføres, samt hvilke typer fund og resultater disse analyser kan generere. Et klassisk tema i metoden er intersubjektivitet; hvordan deltagere orienterer sig mod hinanden og skaber forståelse og mening. Det sker blandt andet ved kropsligt at søge den andens ansigt og øjne for at sikre modtagelse og respons. Artiklen giver både en anvendelsesorienteret introduktion til feltet og præsenterer helt ny forskning inden for tre udvalgte områder. De analyserede eksempler er fra forskellige interaktionssituationer mellem henholdsvis kursister og en service-robot, kolleger i et kontorlandskab samt mellem en borger og en bostøttemedarbejder. Hver især præsenterer eksemplerne, hvilke ressourcer deltagere anvender for at sikre den andens opmærksomhed. Dermed bidrager artiklen med ny viden om den multimodale semiotiske økologi, hvor talende kroppe interagerer i en materiel verden. Artiklen afsluttes med perspektiver på nye forskningsområder.

This article reports on research into the navigational practices of blind and visually impaired people in urban environments. The members of this community encounter many types of obstacles, but this article focuses on ‘unpredictable inanimate moveable objects’. The analyses are based on recorded video material from ‘naturally occurring’ walks in a Danish urban area and are informed by ethnomethodology, with a focus on how blind or visually impaired people navigate and deal with trouble sources. This research unpacks the detailed features of navigation and obstacle-detection in the urban environment and demonstrates the value of using ethnomethodology to analyze the skilled character of everyday navigation in spaces in which the walker-with-cane is a kind of assemblage in harmony or at odds with other surfaces and objects. The findings have implications for space design and technology developments which can assist blind people with obstacle detection. The article uses empirical cases to discuss an ocular-centric bias and suggests the need for a more granular understanding of physical objects and tactile experiences in future developments of a sociology of space.

Consultations in healthcare settings involve an initial phase of “history-taking”, during which the healthcare professional examines the client for symptoms by asking questions, making the client show symptoms on his or her own body, and performing bodily examinations. But how can bodily symptoms be identified when the interaction is video-mediated and sensory access is limited? One key resource here is “body showings”. However, research suggests that video-mediated teleconsultations reduce body showings due to both technical difficulties and sensory obstruction. In this paper, we provide a contrary case that shows two types of practices employed for successful history-taking through body-part showings. Based on an analysis of an “evocative showing sequence” (Licoppe, 2017), we present two types of gestural highlighting practices, via two types of showing sub-sequences: 1) “mimicable body part highlighting”, which occurs in a sequence of “adapting-body-to-frame”; and 2) “direct body part highlighting”, which occurs in a sequence of “adapting-frame-to-body”. The paper uses a single case to discuss how gestures work in a video-mediated context and how sensory judgements are not just a property of the healthcare professional, but are distributed to clients who are able to creatively adapt to situated contingencies in order to accomplish common understanding about the symptoms. The data consist of video-recorded, video-mediated physiotherapy consultations in Denmark, analysed using ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA). The paper contributes to EMCA research on mediated interaction and embodied, gestural and sensorial practices.

Video-Mediated Interaction (VMI) has become a mainstream, recognisable form of interaction that is often necessary for the routine accomplishment of institutional activities. It is probable that, in the wake of COVID-19, we are currently witnessing the emergence of a new normal that is rapidly forcing people to learn how to interact via different kinds of video-mediating technologies. Whereas prior research has predominantly provided insights into, e.g. frequencies of meetings or people’s feelings and experiences based on interviews, in this special issue we present new findings regarding the detailed interactional organisation and sense-making practices in which people are practically engaged, as these naturally unfold in situated contexts. Grounded in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) and video-based data-collection methodology, all of the papers in this special issue explore, at a very detailed and granular level, just how video-mediated interaction is accomplished moment by moment. This approach and its findings contribute new knowledge to research communities working with video-mediation. As such, this approach is of considerable value to practitioners who need to achieve institutional goals in effective ways. In this introduction, we present a short overview of the state-of-the-art in EMCA research, and highlight the new findings contributed by the seven articles in this special issue.

This paper describes two typical semiotic resources blind people use when navigating in urban areas. Everyone makes use of a variety of interpretive semiotic resources and senses when navigating. For sighted individuals, this especially involves sight. Blind people, however, must rely on everything else than sight, thereby substituting sight with other modalities and distributing the navigational work to other semiotic resources. Based on a large corpus of fieldwork among blind people in Denmark, undertaking observations, interviews, and video recordings of their naturally occurring practices of walking and navigating, this paper shows how two prototypical types of semiotic resources function as helpful cognitive extensions: the guide dog and the white cane. This paper takes its theoretical and methodological perspective from EMCA multimodal interaction analysis.

Using ethnomethodology and conversation-analytical methodologies, this article shows how a blind person accomplishes going from A to B. Based on an analysis of a blind person’s walk from a zebra crossing to a train platform, the article offers empirical evidence of how pedestrians and the blind avoid collision in orderly and accountable ways. The article shows how the burden of the interactional work involved in avoidance seems consistently to rest on pedestrians rather than the blind. As the blind person walks, sighted pedestrians move aside. To describe this, we use the metaphor of Moses, who separated the waters. The article discusses the collaborative achievement, moral orders, and joint accomplishment of a blind person navigating in urban environments. It thereby contributes to the growing body of research within Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis studies focused on the spatial turn and public encounters by invoking a notion of hierarchy among pedestrians.

New ideas in organisations are often developed during business meetings and are thus dependent on the local setting and the participants’ abilities to collaboratively ideate turn by turn. Using ethnomethodology and multimodal conversation analysis as its methodological and theoretical framework, this article shows how idea development can be accomplished through the co-construction of a co-imagined space that functions as a resource for participants. This co-constructed imagination space is a theoretical construct which in oriented-to details can be accomplished through (1) organisation of turn-taking during discussions, (2) embodied orientations, and (3) use of local material structures and the environment.

Editorial for Vol. 2 Issue 1

Instructing others to do something with an object is an ordinary practice that may involve embodied demonstrations. Based on a single case analysis of a “troublemaker” example we show how the instructor decomposes the general instruction into more mechanic steps that can be mimicked by the instructee. The example is chosen because it reveals some of the taken for granted knowledge involved in accomplishing an instruction. The case is from a video mediated civil service setting in Denmark. In this setting, it is often necessary for a citizen to use a locally present object, e.g. a printer, and this may require instructions from the employee who is physically located elsewhere. We show how the instructor within a sequence decomposes the instruction from indexical references to known practices for dealing with objects to a more simplified discernible step-by-step description orchestrated by mimicable embodied demonstrations. Thus, the paper contributes with new insights about two aspects of recipient design in instructions and embodied interaction specifically linked to a video-mediated setting. The study is based on 8 h of video recordings of video-mediated encounters and applies EMCA multimodal interaction analysis.

Passing an object is an everyday action with which most people are familiar. It involves detailed organizations of the body within a spatial and material setting. One place where objects are continuously passed is at the optician. Based on more than 700 hours of video recordings at 11 Danish opticians, this article shows how passing glasses is accomplished in an institutional context where the optician is interactionally constructed as responsible for securing the safe passing and avoiding the (problematic) drop. The paper contributes to EMCA studies on passings by showing how these actions may display deontic responsibilities, and how the passings are accomplished mainly by the optician using a specific grip, relying on tactile experiences, constantly monitoring the customer behaviour, and embodily anticipating next actions.

Inden for medie- og kommunikationsforskningen har der været sporadisk fokus på de ideudviklingsprocesser, der ligger bag udviklingen af medie- og kommunikationsløsninger. Men præcis viden om, hvordan ideer på møder i kommunikationsafdelinger fremsættes og behandles i autentisk interaktion mangler. Gennem en række eksempler udvikles i artiklen en sammenhængende systematik for, hvilke formater deltagere bruger når de 1) fremsætter ideer, responderer 2a) positivt (affilierende) eller 2b) negativt (disaffilierende), og hvordan ideer 3a) accepteres eller 3b) kritikhåndteres. Artiklen bygger på data fra tre forskellige danske kommunikationsafdelinger, der har arbejdet med at udvikle nye kommunikationsprodukter. Artiklen præsenterer en række formater, der er blevet fremanalyseret med videoetnografisk og konversationsanalytisk metode. Artiklens formål er at give et overblik over de mest almindelige formater under ideudviklingsmøder.

Denne artikel viser, hvordan deltagere på idéudviklingsmøder i danske organisationer skaber fremdrift og fælles forståelse i idéudviklingsprocessen via en række lokale semiotiske ressourcer. Artiklen trækker på Distributed Cognition (DC) (Hutchins 1995) som en teoretisk baggrundsforståelse for, hvad der konstituerer et aktivitetssystem, og anvender multimodal Etnometodologisk Conversation Analysis (EM/CA) som konkret analysemetode. Artiklen bidrager dels med ny viden om, hvordan idéer kognitivt er indlejret i idéudviklingshandlingerne og dels hvordan idéer skabes sekventielt, simultant og multimodalt. Herunder hvordan ”konceptuelle formulationer” udtrykker fælles orientering og dermed er en ressource for idéudviklingen. Artiklen eksemplificerer også, hvordan DC og EM/CA sammen kan anvendes analytisk.

When people interact in institutional settings, they frequently invoke procedure. Professionals invoke procedure in order to set or negotiate the frame for the interaction: how it can, will, should or usually does proceed. This paper identifies an instance of invoking procedure (InP) by five criteria: a participant projects a forthcoming action or series of events, and accounts for the projection; the account conveys institutional reasoning (e.g. purpose, conditions) for projecting the forthcoming action(s), and often invokes membership categories, tacit norms and rules. Through a conversation analytic study, we outline a typology on the functions of invoking procedure and what is accomplished in situ. Our analyses show six local functions of InP in institutional talk-in-interaction: (1) announcing procedure, (2) forcing procedure, (3) negotiating procedure, (4) dealing with criticism of procedure, (5) distancing oneself from procedure, and (6) leaving procedure. Overall, invoking procedure appears to be an important feature of institutional interaction used by professionals in order to deal with asymmetries, negotiate procedure and orient to membership competence acquisition and socialization practices.

This paper considers how information sheets are used as a resource for joint attention and decision-making in a situated service encounter. The optician shop is a perspicuous setting for addressing decision-making as an interactional accomplishment informed by information sheets, because they are routinely used and made relevant by sellers. The paper builds on ethnomethodological multimodal conversation analysis and a large corpus of more than 700 hours of video recordings from eleven different Danish optician shops. Based on one single analysis from this corpus, the paper shows how the sheet is used cooperatively and oriented to in situ as a shared resource in the process of selling/buying glasses. A key finding is that the information sheet is not just a resource for the seller but a shared resource for established joint attention and decision-making. More generally, the paper contributes to studies of service and sales encounters by highlighting the importance of inscribed objects to decision-making processes in social interaction.