Liliana Lovallo, Henning Vahlenkamp
Who we are
The Netzwerk für Doktorand*innen der Gesprächsforschung (DokGF) is a group of German-speaking PhD students working with Conversation Analysis (CA) and Interactional Linguistics (IL). Its main purpose is to offer a platform where early career researchers can share ideas and expand their knowledge, thus fostering cooperation at all stages of the PhD journey.
In addition to biannual network meetings, members of the network organize online data sessions on a regular basis. In an informal setting, participants are welcome to present data material from their PhD projects and/or discuss research methodologies with peers from similar research backgrounds.
How it works
Data sessions represent a popular format in CA, as they offer a valuable method for sharing and verifying observations on interactional data among colleagues. Drawing on this well-established format, each of our meetings provides one participant with an opportunity to present and discuss excerpts from their data in a group of peers.
Our data sessions are scheduled on a monthly basis and take place every last Thursday between 4 and 6 p.m. (CET). Periodical invitations and reminders are sent via the DokGF mailing list to announce topic(s) and presenter of the upcoming session. In order to enable network members to participate independent of location, meetings take place online. Each session lasts 90 minutes, and participants can stay afterwards to discuss general topics of common interest relating to projects, research methods, or academic activities.
PhD students at all stages are encouraged to participate and bring their own data. Students at the beginning of their PhD journey — who have possibly not yet developed precise research questions or gathered fine-grained data collections — are warmly welcome to discuss methodological aspects of CA/IL research with more experienced peers as well. The group size ranges from four up to a dozen participants. Participants sharing their data material can decide whether they want to focus on a specific set of pre-defined phenomena or encourage the group to exercise unmotivated looking, allowing for observations to be made independently of specific research questions.
At the beginning of each session, both audio/video recordings and transcripts are shared with the group via a cloud link. Presenters are free to choose the number of extracts they want to discuss, depending on the nature of the data and the phenomenon under scrutiny. It is important here to ensure that presenters do not share sensitive data or take appropriate measures to protect the research participants’ identities, e.g., through anonymization or the application of video filters. On average, three to four extracts are discussed per session. In most cases, data are transcribed according to the GAT 2 conventions (Selting et al. 2009), a well-established standard for CA/IL transcriptions in German language. For projects demanding complex multimodal analysis, including non-verbal aspects of interaction such as gaze, gestures, spatial arrangements of the participants’ bodies, object manipulation, etc., transcripts are often expanded on the basis of the conventions described in Mondada (2018). These allow the alignment of spoken language and visual phenomena in the same transcript with a differentiation between modalities and are therefore an ideal instrument for the analysis of multimodal communicative conduct.
General structure of the sessions
Sessions follow an identical structure: At first, the presenting researcher starts by briefly providing basic information about the data material and the context in which it was gathered. In order to avoid hasty conclusions, researchers are encouraged to limit their background information to aspects necessary for understanding. Excerpts are played multiple times for the audience to get a first impression. In this first round of exploration, participants note down their thoughts and observations. In most cases, participants have time to look at the associated transcript individually and — if the material is not subject to data-protection constraints — review visual material for themselves.
Following this, the floor is open for discussion. Participants use the “raise hand” function to contribute their observations or to ask for further clarifications in light of the often specific research settings and questions. Recordings are commonly replayed multiple times in the course of the sessions, as participants often request to discuss specific passages in greater detail. This procedure of focusing on specific sections of the recordings also facilitates a thorough and fine-grained examination of noticeable phenomena. Relevant annotation software such as ELAN and EXMERaLDA simplifies this task, as it allows to change the replay speed, hence making frame-by-frame examination possible.
How to participate
If you would like to join us for (one of) our monthly data sessions, do not hesitate to contact our group at dokgf@dokgf.de for further information on how to participate in our data sessions. The sessions are normally held in German, but researchers with an international background are very welcome to attend. Up-to-date information can also be found at https://dokgf.conversationanalysis.org/start/forschungswerkstatt/.
References
ELAN (Version 6.7) [Computer software]. (2023). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Language Archive. Retrieved from https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan.
EXMARaLDA [Computer Software]. (2023). Retrieved from https://exmaralda.org/de.
Mondada, L. (2018). Multiple Temporalities of Language and Body in Interaction: Challenges for Transcribing Multimodality. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51 (1), 85–106.
Selting, Margret & Auer, Peter & Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar & Bergmann, Jörg & Bergmann, Pia & Birkner, Karin & Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth & Deppermann, Arnulf & Gilles, Peter & Günthner, Susanne & Hartung, Martin & Kern, Friederike & Mertzlufft, Christine & Meyer, Christian & Morek, Miriam & Oberzaucher, Frank & Peters, Jörg & Quasthoff, Uta & Schütte, Wilfried & Uhmann, Susanne (2009). Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2 (GAT 2). Gesprächsforschung – Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion, 10, 353–402.