[Air-L] Text analysis of blog posts and comment threads: discourse analysis vs. conversation analysis

gus andrews gus.andrews at gmail.com
Fri Jul 9 12:02:34 PDT 2010


Alex, I'm the one whose post about conversation analysis and online
texts you found from two years ago :) My dissertation is now in the
final stages of revision; I successfully defended earlier this year. A
relatively final draft can be found online at
http://www.studyplace.org/wiki/User:Gusandrews/SearchProject/1208chapters
.

My dissertation's findings actually suggested a revision to some
fundamental assumptions about CA; namely, Sacks et al.'s
"speaker-selects-next" mechanism for orderly turn-taking. Rather,
because there is so little pressure to respond online, the mechanism
seems to be speaker-selects-previous. Harrison, Marcoccia, and Ornberg
came to similar conclusions (see my bibliography,
http://www.studyplace.org/wiki/User:Gusandrews/SearchProject/1208chapters#9._BIBLIOGRAPHY
) I posit that this may be the case in face to face communication as
well. (I should note that I am working in anthropology at a school of
education, with an eclectic committee, and I may be unaware of other
similar claims made elsewhere in conversation analysis, so if I'm
stating something which has already been determined it's out of my
limited knowledge.)

 I think Natalya said it well -- what you hope to accomplish should
determine which methodology you use. CA is useful if you're doing
anything which involves turn-taking, sense-making, and maintaining
order. It was of some use with my blog comment threads; it would also
be useful in chat, threaded email, or possibly even @responses in
Twitter. It couldn't explain everything I was seeing, though, so I
dropped back to rely on some other, more rudimentary linguistic tools.
I talked a lot about the phatic and indexical functions of language.
If you're not looking at how people talk *with* each other or at
sequential responses, CA is going to be not so fruitful. Discourse
analysis, as I understand it, serves better for understanding cultural
context.

Regards,
Gillian "Gus" Andrews



More information about the Air-L mailing list