On Mar 30, 2005, at 8:37 PM, Denise N. Rall wrote:
Assoc Prof Christian Nelson has been recently on this list. He's a great scholar of ethnomethodology. He offered a great reading list on ethomethodology. He has emailed this website in the last few months so check the archives for his email address.
Cheers, Denise
Thanks for the promotion, Denise ;-) Unfortunately, I'm still an *assistant* professor ("Scholar in Residence" is Emerson's term for "visiting assistant prof."). Whatever the case, I know a bit about ethnomethodological (EM) investigations into computer research. There are two teams of EMists/CAists who frequently publish in this area: 1) Wes Sharrock, Graham Button, and Bob Anderson and 2) Paul Luff and Christian Heath. Their work is mainly on HCI, so you could look up their work using the www.hci.bib seach tool. I think Sharrock et al. have also done some work on software design in general--you could find out if they've done more general work using the EM/CA (ethnomethodology/conversation analysis) bibliography maintained by Paul ten Have at http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/emca/resource.htm (there are separate bibs for pre- and post-'89 works). In addition to this stuff, you should see Lucy Suchman's acclaimed EM work in the area of computers and computer use. Finally, you may already be aware of CA work by Angela Garcia and (E.) Sean Rintel on the participation structure of asynchronous chats and such. (Sean's work doesn't seem to be listed in ten Have's bib, so see Sean's CV at http://www.albany.edu/~er8430/work.html). Don Winiecki has also done interesting CA work in the area--search the AIR-l list archives for a list of his writing and a bib. he provided on the subject. Please note that, despite suggestions to the contrary on this list, EM is NOT the same as ethnography. I've written a bit about this--specifically with regard to the relationship between ethnography and the sometime branch of EM known as conversation analysis in the following: Nelson, C. K. (1994). Ethnomethodological positions on the use of ethnographic data in conversation analytic research. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 23, 307-29. I should note that, while it is fairly easy to delineate the relationship between CA and ethnography, it is not so easy to delineate the relationship between ethnography and EM sans CA. (This is one indication of the fact that the relationship between CA and EM is not easy to specify, and the relationship between CAists and EMists has been very strained at times.) As for the difficulties in deliniation, EM is not easy to define--its practitioners even argue against doing so, and its founder, Harold Garfinkel has indicated that there are no a priori criteria for determining whether a piece of research is EMical or not. Ugh. Adding to the confusion, Garfinkel's recent book ("EM's Program") suggests that one must "go native" to do EM research, thus suggesting a link to some kinds of traditional ethnography; however, a lot of early EM argued that (traditional) ethnography was flawed in treating informants as "research adjuncts" (i.e., folks who were interested in/capable of disinterested reports of beliefs, etc.) rather than treating their responses to the researchers questions as interested "accounts" (see especially D. Lawrence Weider's "Language and social reality: the case of telling the convict code" for an extended and very instructive example of this argument). Best, Christian Nelson Christian Nelson, Ph.D. Scholar in Residence Dept. of Marketing and Health Communication 120 Boylston St. Emerson College Boston, MA 02116-4624