This paper examines the affordances of a component in a seri-ous game, specifically how one material design choice affectedthe interactions and opportunities for agency and learning. Thegame examined is a megagame, a large-scale (20-100 participants)social learning environment combining board-gaming with role-playing. The megagame poses participants the challenge of creatinga sustainable society, and focuses on developing participants’ un-derstanding of how different stakeholders in a regional energysystem and society are interconnected. Negotiation over conflictinggoals was a primary activity in the game, and agreements wereformalized through paper contracts. Contracts were designed toact as boundary objects between player teams, and defined theirfinancial exchanges. This exploratory study finds evidence in theinteractions between participants that the paper contract systemfacilitated opportunities for participants to develop understandingabout the interdependencies between teams and resources, andto exert agency over their role in these relations. Players activelymaintained and prioritized the correspondence between copies ofcontracts as a means of regulating both the game’s economic sys-tem in the game and their mutual intersubjectivity. Overall, thestudy highlights the importance enabling participants to experiencehow joint actions cumulatively produce future consequences, andhow opportunities for agency and negotiation educate about theongoing global polycrises of energy, climate and social tension.

Repetition has often been argued to be a semiotic device that iconically signifies 'more content', such as intensity and plurality. However, through multimodal interaction analysis of materials in English, Estonian, and Swedish, this paper demonstrates how self-repetition is used to coordinate actions across participants and temporally organize the ongoing activity. The data are taken from infant mealtimes, pilates classes, dance training, boardgames, rock climbing, and opera rehearsals. Repetition of both lexical and non-lexical tokens can prolong, postpone, and generally organize segments of action as well as co-create rhythms and moves in a moment-by-moment reflexive relationship with other (non-vocalizing) participants. A crucial feature of repetitions is that they can be flexibly extended to fit the other's public performance, its launching, continuation, and projectable completion. We argue that the iconicity of repetition emerges through its indexical relationship to other bodies, as a real-time jointly achieved phenomenon.

In 1985–1986, Doug Maynard and Courtney Marlaire recorded videos of thirteen children going through developmental diagnostic processes. After duplicating the soon-to-be obsolete Betamax tapes onto VHS tapes (now also obsolete), they each stored a separate working copy of the data. Incredibly, they later discovered that they had each, independently, lost the recording of one particular interview that became central to their foundational work on interaction in autism diagnosis (Maynard, 2005). Thankfully, the clips and audiotape copies made while doing transcription had preserved enough of this recording for analytic purposes, but the anecdote illustrates that careful data management is necessary for any Conversation Analysis (CA) project. Data collected by the first generation of conversation analysts were recorded onto tape or film, duplicated, transcribed on a typewriter, and mimeographed before being shared by post or passed from hand to hand. Some corpora that were central to early teaching materials and core publications became “classic data,” often returned to as familiar examples of a phenomenon, reanalyzed, and reused in analytic collections (Bolden, 2015). Even today, half-centuryold data with titles like “Chicken Dinner,” “Two Girls,” and “Auto-Discussion” are frequently used and cited in CA research (e.g., Bolden, 2018; Clift, 2020; Lerner, 1993; Schegloff, 1988, 2007; Sidnell, 2006). Some classic data such as Jefferson’s (2007) Newport Beach transcripts have been digitized and published online, but most only circulate as excerpts in publications, at workshops, between mentors and students or – as among the first generation of conversation analysts – informally between colleagues (Drew et al., 2015). While the reuse and reexamination of classic data has contributed to the robustness and longevity of CA findings (De Ruiter & Albert, 2017), informal methods of data management have restricted access for many (Hoey & Raymond, 2022). For example, key data extracts that are simply published as transcripts are only available for further analysis by researchers who can gain access to original clips and recordings. T his chapter outlines the first steps to mitigate these risks and ensure the security, reusability, and accessibility of data as soon as field recordings are complete (see Hoey & Webb, Chapter 2, this volume), from initial data capture and backup, to cataloguing and organizing multiple data sources, to anonymizing and otherwise preparing data for sharing. We reserve discussion of working with clips and collections for a separate chapter (Hofstetter & Albert, Chapter 9, this volume).

In the late 1980s, Gene Lerner (with user input from Emanuel Schegloff) developed the first piece of data management and analysis software designed specifically for Conversation Analysis (CA) research. ‘The WorkBench’ (see Figure 9.1) enabled researchers to organize, index, search, code, and annotate audio and video clips, media-synced transcripts, and data collections. At the time, the few available software tools designed for qualitative data analysis provided only generic methods for coding and indexing textual data (see Tesch, 2013, pp. 150–166). The WorkBench, by contrast, provided a rich environment for hypertextual digital media composition and transcription that met CA’s methodological requirements for working flexibly with naturalistic observational data, addressing growing concerns that qualitative data analysis software tools could standardize and entrench reductive analytic practices (Coffey et al., 1996). Specialized use of new-media technologies has shaped the field of interaction analysis from its outset (Laurier, 2014), and new tools and empirical materials, from social media to 3D video, are continuously opening up new analytic affordances, research questions, and methodological challenges (McIlvenny, 2019; Meredith & Stokoe, 2014). While methodological discussions about novel research tools remain essential, technology-specific recommendations can quickly become outdated (Goodwin, 1993). In this chapter, therefore, we discuss the various practices, tools, and workflows interaction researchers use to analyze their data, without focusing specifically on digital tools. The choices we make among tools and techniques for data collection, comparison, and annotation are also analytic choices, so we focus on the affordances and constraints those choices entail. We begin at the point that the researcher has collected their primary data (see Hoey & Webb, Chapter 2, this volume), organized the field recordings (Albert & Hofstetter, Chapter 4, this volume), made some initial analytic observations (see Clift & Mandelbaum, Chapter 6, this volume) and are ready to build a collection (see Clayman, Chapter 8, this volume). We describe how conversation analysts review and segment recordings into clips, how they name and keep track of their files, and how data management processes inform and constitute analysis itself. We then focus on three practical methods researchers use to organize data for analysis using both analog and digital tools. Finally, we outline data management methods that analysts use to prepare clips for sharing in collaborative data sessions.

Delays in the completion of joint actions are sometimes unavoidable. How should a robot communicate that it cannot immediately act or respond in a collaborative task? Drawing on video recordings of a face scanning activity in family homes, we investigate how humans make sense of a Cozmo robot’s delays on a moment-by-moment basis. Cozmo’s sounds and embodied actions are recognized as indicators of delay but encourage human participants to act in ways that undermine the scanning process. In comparing the robot’s delay management strategies with human-human vocal and embodied practices, we demonstrate key differences in the sequences that impact how the robot is understood. The study demonstrates how delay events are accomplished as embodied displays that are distributed across co-participants. We present a framework for making delay transparent through situated explanations, particularly in the form of non-lexical sounds and bodily actions.

Games are ostensibly a special mode of interaction in which the ordinary rules and expectations of everyday life are temporarily put on hold. However, little research has examined how players themselves treat actions as being inside or outside of the game during their actual gameplay. This paper presents an analysis of face-to-face gameplay interactions in order to theorize, from players’ perspectives, a basis for categorizing activities as “outside”/“inside” the game, and what players treat as “metagaming” in situ. We use conversation analysis to inspect the multimodal ways in which gamers manage the complexities of multiple activities in the interactive context of tabletop board games. We show how players orient to the game’s ongoing progress while managing other concurrent activities.

Games are ostensibly a special mode of interaction in which the ordinary rules and expectations of everyday life are temporarily put on hold. However, little research has examined how players themselves treat actions as being inside or outside of the game during their actual gameplay. This paper presents an analysis of face-to-face gameplay interactions in order to theorize, from players’ perspectives, a basis for categorizing activities as “outside”/“inside” the game, and what players treat as “metagaming” in situ. We use conversation analysis to inspect the multimodal ways in which gamers manage the complexities of multiple activities in the interactive context of tabletop board games. We show how players orient to the game’s ongoing progress while managing other concurrent activities.

While the lexico-grammatical and embodied practices in various instructional activities have been explored in-depth (Keevallik, 2013; Simone & Galatolo, 2020), the vocal capacities deployed by instructors have not been in focus. This study looks at how a Pilates instructor coaches student bodies by modulating the prosodic production of verbal instructions and adjusting vocal quality in reflexive coordination with the students ongoing movements. We show how the body of one participant can be expressed and enhanced by anothers voice in a simultaneous assembly of action and argue for the dialogical conceptualization of a speaker. These voice-body assemblies constitute evidence of how actions were brought about jointly rather than constructed individually.