Considerable attention has been paid in the CA literature to the glossing practices through which participants in conversation formulate who they are, what they are talking about, where the things they are talking about are located, and so forth. There are, of course, gestural glossing practices as well. For any concept or category presented gesturally, however, there is a range of possibilities from which a particular formulation may be adopted on any actual occasion of use. Identifying alternative formulations serves as a useful analytic exercise for exploring the pragmatic consequences of a produced gesture. In our own research, we have been studying the practices through which surgeons provide instruction while performing surgeries in a teaching hospital. We describe here a particular anatomy lesson produced during a surgery. The attending surgeon uses his hands and arms to gesturally construct a representation of a specific anatomic region (“the Triangle of Doom”) for the benefit of two medical students viewing and participating in the surgery. Employing the structure of Schegloff’s analysis of place formulations, we conduct an analysis of the attending’s gestural formulation. We will show how analyzing a particular gesture in this way illuminates both the intricate ways in which the gesture is tied to its context of production and the exquisite specificity of the gesture itself.

No abstract

Examining a fragment of interaction that occurred during a surgery at a teaching hospital, we explore how particular instructed experiences are produced for two trainees, a surgeon in the residency program and a medical student in a surgical clerkship. We are concerned with what is produced as learnable in each case. Stated slightly differently, we are interested in the ways in which the attending surgeon uses demonstrations as instruction and the ways in which recipients of that instruction, in this case the resident and the clerk, respond with enactments of those demonstrated actions. The recipients of this kind of instruction participate in a form of experiential learning in which they enact their own versions of the instructor’s demonstrated actions to be observed and assessed by the instructor. These enactments provide learners with experiential access to the instructor’s demonstrated actions. They are designed to be experiences that learners may draw upon to make experientially warranted claims at some later time.

The related fields of ethnomethodology (EM), founded by Harold Garfinkel, and conversation analysis (CA), as epitomized by the work of Harvey Sacks, offer unique insights into the operation of virtual reference services (VRS). The tradition of phenomenology within library and information science (LIS) provides a context for this research, although EM/CA differs in important respects, providing a program for grounded empirical investigations. Relevant EM/CA research concerns include the documentary method of interpretation, trust, indexicality, instructed action, and sequential organization. Review of the LIS literature on reference interactions in both face-to-face and virtual settings reveals a tendency to impose analytic categories and classificatory schemes that obscure the extremely situated and collaborative nature of reference work; however, an EM/CA examination of transcripts from the first 4 months of a newly implemented VRS at a large university library suggests the need for a more nuanced approach. Close-order examination of two chat reference transcripts reveals the interactional complexities and nuances that characterize even the most succinct encounters. Analyzing the reference query as a service request demonstrates how librarians deploy their interactional skills to address "face" concerns and ameliorate potentially problematic aspects of the reference encounter.

No abstract