Media on CD-ROM

Some of the multimedia materials for this course include very large files (10 to 65 MegaBytes) which cannot be easily used from the course website directly. They are being made available on CD-ROM. Even so, not all the material is included, only representative samples, so that you can see how analyses of multimedia material are presented by various authors. We will be less interested in the content of these analyses than in the manner of presentation and the creation of multimedia academic "articles".

For each author and topic, notes are provided here on what to look for on the CD. Feel free to also browse any other files.

You will need Acrobat Reader, Quicktime movie viewer, and MS Word to view the files. These viewers can all be downloaded for free from the internet if you do not already have them on the computer you are using.

The information below is organized according to the unit of the course syllabus where we will be using the materials. Note that the course units below do NOT list ALL the readings for that unit, only the multimedia materials. Check the course syllabus page for the complete reading assignments for these units.
 

9. Multimedia Analysis: Video, action, and gesture 

Goodwin, Charles. (In press). Pointing as situated practice. To appear in Sotaro Kita, Ed., Pointing: Where Language, Culture and Cognition Meet. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 

Goodwin, Charles. 2000. Action and embodiment within situation human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 1489 – 1522.     

Charles Goodwin at UCLA  is a leading researcher in the "ethnomethodology" and "conversation analysis" (CA) tradition. His recent work has focused on understanding the role of action, gesture, and the use of material artifacts in the process of face-to-face talk-in-interaction. He sent me a CD which contains multimedia files that illustrate two of his recent papers, cited above. The "Pointing" paper is about a group of archeology students who are learning to record the exact color of layer of soil which they are excavating; to do this they compare the soil with color samples on a Munsell Chart. The "Action" paper is about a group of Latina girls playing hopscotch and arguing about following the rules.

On the CD you should start by going to the folder Goodwin_mxm, and its subfolder /HELP. Open the Acrobat file help.pdf to see the way in which Goodwin uses Acrobat to combine text, transcript, sound files, annotation of the transcript, video, and bibliograpy references. The movie will work in this case (if you have Quicktime or another viewer for .mov video files).

In the main folder, action1.pdf is the full annotation multimedia paper. Most of the video and audio will not work, but you can follow the argument and see how the multimedia is intended to function, as illustrated in the Help file. The file actbody.pdf, for comparison, is the same paper without the multimedia and annotations. Cinco.pdf is the transcript of the "Action" paper. Munsell.pdf is the transcript of the "Pointing" paper. The video in the helpfile refers to the "Pointing" paper and is transcribed in Munsell.pdf. The complete set of file includes not only the whole video for each paper, but smaller video segments. The audio is the same audio as in the video files in all cases, but it can be played without the video.

In class we will have all the files available and will look at how the multimedia paper can be "read" in real time. For preparation, look at these files and read the multimedia version of the "Action" paper (action1.pdf).

10. Multimedia Analysis: Transcribing a television commercial 

Thibault, P.J. 2000. The multimodal transcription of a television advertisement. In A. Baldry, Ed., Multimodality and Multimediality in the distance learning age. Campobasso, Italy: Palladino.    

Paul Thibault, Associate Professor at the University of Venice, was a student of Michael Halliday and works in the tradition of systemic functional linguistics and social semiotics. His recent work studies multimedia and has similarities to Critical Discourse Analysis; he is interested in the political and ideological messages in popular media. He and I and a mutual friend Alan Mansfield did an analysis in the 1980s of a television commercial for a then new national banking corporation in Australia. The bank resulted from a merger and had a new name, which it was trying to market, along with its new image, to the country. Paul decided to use this same video and analysis to develop a more complete method of multimedia transcription, which is described in the article cited above. The Appendix to this article includes the full transcript, across several columns for different aspects of the audio-visual medium (words, sound effects, visual images, music, etc.), and for each row there is a "still" image from the video to mark the unit of analysis. In the paper, he also shows some acoustical sound analysis diagrams and various other diagrams to summarize units of organization of the video.

On the CD, go the folder Thibault_mxm. The file texttra22.doc is the main body of the paper, including its Figures (at the end of the manuscript). The Appendix, containing the multimedia transcript itself, is pjtpav.doc . It is 34MB because it contains so many still photo images, even though each image is relatively small. (The CD that he sent me did not include the actual video, which is probably copyrighted by the bank.)

Read the article (which is also available on the course website) and look at the sections of the multimedia transcript that illustrate the points Thibault is making in the article. Notice particularly that in this case, transcription really does depend heavily on theory and goes a long way towards being an analysis in itself.
 

12. Multimedia Analysis: Learning in multimodal interaction – A Synthesis 

Lemke, J.L.  "Typological and Topological Meaning in Diagnostic Discourse." Discourse Processes 27(2), 173-185. 1999. 

This paper was published a few years ago in a journal which included a CD along with the printed issue. It was a special issue devoted entirely to the analysis of a single segment of videotape of a group of medical students and their mentor in a "Problem-based Learning" session in a large medical school. Each article in the special issue presented an analysis of this same learning episode using the theoretical perspectives of the different authors. The whole issue is well worth looking at.

On the CD, go to the folder PBL-data. The file Start.htm gives an introduction to the session being analyzed and has links to a video of the session (only the 2x version is on your CD), the transcript, and the transcription conventions. There is also a diagram of the arrangement of the room. My analysis, for the article cited above, is in the file PBL-ART.doc . View the video, read the transcript, and then read my analysis. Note that in some cases the line numbers for the transcript are different in my article than in the transcript on the CD. I was working with the preliminary transcript that the editors sent to the authors, but they "corrected" it for the final version. In the printed article some of these line numbering changes were made, but not in the manuscript, which you have on the CD. This is typical of the complications in multimedia work, especially when it is collaborative.

Pay attention in the video and my analysis to the relationships between speech, gesture, and the material artifacts that are integrated into the communication and interaction of the participants.